Project Leader: Prof. Dr. Hab. Aldona Glińska-Neweś
Organizations, and especially enterprises, are often seen as the main drivers of environmental degradation. However, they are also capable of creating positive change. Organizations play a crucial role in ensuring the effectiveness of initiatives aimed at environmental protection and ecosystem restoration. The development of eco-friendly products and innovative environmental technologies, as well as the promotion of sustainable development in society, largely depends on the actions taken by enterprises and other organizations. Fulfilling such a key role in building a sustainable future requires organizations to implement pro-environmental policies, practices, and systems within their strategies, organizational cultures, and procedures.
Solutions such as eco-friendly technologies, products, and processes need to be analyzed in terms of both the organization’s engagement in their design and implementation and their acceptance by potential users. The EMERGE project aims to build a multi-level model explaining why and how organizations address contemporary environmental challenges. Sustainable development issues are among the leading topics in research across multiple disciplines, making the proposed model highly promising in terms of contributing interdisciplinary theoretical insights. At the same time, it will serve as a universal tool for assessing the feasibility of implementing and scaling up pro-environmental solutions.
The approach adopted in this project combines two perspectives:
- Since “statements about organizations are statements about the behavior of people” (March & Simon, 1958: 26), the project focuses on the human dimension of pro-environmental actions. The actual contribution of organizations to sustainable development depends on changes in the behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge of individuals acting as entrepreneurs, managers, employees, and consumers.
- The complex nature of organizational transformation toward sustainability requires a multi-level (macro, meso, and micro) view of interactions among individuals, organizations, markets, technologies, policies, cultures, and discourses. Therefore, this project involves a multi-level analysis of the nature and interconnections of factors influencing organizational and individual transformations that foster awareness and engagement in sustainable development.
The multidisciplinary approach of the project will address questions related to:
- Macro, organizational, and individual determinants of pro-environmental awareness and behaviors of individual actors (entrepreneurs, leaders, employees, and consumers);
- Forces, processes, and mechanisms underlying the interconnections among macro, organizational, and individual factors (e.g., between law, green innovations in organizations, and pro-environmental behavior of employees);
- The nature of organizations’ pro-environmental activities across all functional areas, including stakeholder relations, strategic management, R&D, human resource management, marketing, and communication.
The multidisciplinary nature of the project entails using a variety of research methods, including individual and group interviews, surveys, experiments, and data exploration techniques such as text mining and sentiment analysis.