MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Sustainability Progress Is Stalled at Most Companies

While many companies talk the talk of sustainability, claiming to be integrating environmental and societal concerns into their business models, far fewer walk the walk: Managers typically treat sustainability as someone else’s problem and relegate it to a department or even a single individual. On the other hand, companies that have been successful in transforming their business models to be more sustainable have embedded sustainability into their corporate DNA. This means that they have endowed their employees with a sense of sustainable ownership, spurring them to engage in more sustainability-supporting behaviors. When every employee integrates environmental and social concerns into every business decision, sustainability progress is accelerated — an aspirational goal for all companies.

To shed light on the state of play in embedding sustainability and identify key bottlenecks, the Center for Sustainable Business at the University of Pittsburgh collaborated with The Harris Poll to conduct a survey of U.S. employees. We wanted to find out whether their employers were taking measures that our earlier research had identified as important to prompting employees to conduct business through a sustainability lens. Our survey drew responses from 1,056 employees, representative of the U.S. employee base. We defined sustainability for the respondents as “integrating environmental and societal concerns into business decisions and actions.”

About the Author

CB Bhattacharya is director of the Center for Sustainable Business and the H.J. Zoffer Chair in Sustainability and Ethics at the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. Rob Jekielek is managing director of The Harris Poll.

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