Humanizing sustainability in organizations: a place for workers’ perceptions and behaviors in sustainability indexes?

Abstract

The triple bottom line is at risk of being reduced to an accounting tool rather than serving as a paradigm for organizational sustainability. To be successful, approaches promoting organizational sustainability should be humanized, that is, to further incorporate measures of perceptions and behaviors toward the environment, the economy, and the society in their frameworks and/or indexes of sustainability. The first goal of this work is to illustrate the importance of adopting this approach by assessing employees’ perceptions and behaviors of a banking institution highly committed to sustainability, focusing on the environmental bottom line. The second goal is to contribute to understanding of the antecedents of decisive perceptions (perceived organizational support toward the environment) and behaviors (organizational citizenship behavior toward the environment) by exploring if and/or how the relation between them is moderated by organizational policies, middle-management support, and employees’ social norms. Data analyses of an online questionnaire (N = 145) showed that employees’ perceptions and behaviors were above average and allowed tailoring intervention strategies to further promote environmental sustainability. The results further evinced that middle-management support strengthened the relation between perceived organizational support and organizational citizenship behaviors toward the environment. Organizational policies had a small moderating effect that became non-significant when management support was taken into account, and employees’ social norms toward the environment had no effect. This work describes a humanized and successful way of promoting sustainability in organizations through the dynamization of sustainable policies, processes, and practices by middle managers.

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