Sustainable Management Systems for Sustainable Organizations

Dear Colleagues,

As the global community seeks to move towards sustainable stewardship of our natural and social systems, the roles of nations, organizations and individuals in achieving sustainable outcomes is constantly expanding. Matching the ambitious scope of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), actions and changing patterns of behavior are required by all organizations that wish to contribute to national sustainability outcomes while supporting sustainability behaviors by their employees.

Importantly, solutions that are themselves sustainable need to bridge the technical and the social to ensure longevity and effectiveness. In many respects, the privileging of the technical approaches to development that ignored wider impacts has been the cause of current problems. It is clear that solutions that do not address the social and human elements of change cannot themselves be sustained.

Themes like “triple bottom line” and sustainable HRM (S-HRM) have elucidated the importance of a wider definition of performance beyond the technical and economic to include the human-level of analysis. This includes both the potential impacts that employee management systems may have on people within the organization and also how those systems may influence the decisions taken by people to achieve sustainable outcomes—in essence, systems that create a productive system within organizations themselves can be sustained while also assisting in the delivery of wider sustainability outcomes.

The key elements of sustainable management systems are that they are future-oriented rather than short-term in their perspectives, they view diversity as a source of value rather than an expense, they successfully balance social and ecological responsibility with economic and productive efficiency and they do not trade off supporting human stakeholders (employees, suppliers, customers) for organizational success.

The recent COVID pandemic, alongside other actual and potential exigencies, have lent both currency and urgency to these challenges. The mooted “great resignation” was caused by an unwillingness of employees to return to old ways of working after the social and economic reset of 2020. Globalization, once seen as an unstoppable and inevitable trend, is increasingly strained and fractured by geopolitical events. More generally, as younger workers enter the workforce and older workers exit, pressure is building for changes in the underlying values of organizations and work.

This issue is intentionally broad in its scope, and we hope to gather a variety of perspectives relating to how organizations are adapting to the sustainability imperative, with a potential focus on those adaptations required at the human level.

1. How are organizations adapting to the challenges of sustaining a new workforce while addressing issues of sustainability?
2. How are organizations developing new productive systems, and measures of performance, in response to the challenges confronting the world economy?
3. How is enhanced flexibility being incorporated into HRM systems as a means to ensure greater employee commitment and organizational longevity?
4. From the human point of view, what sustainability values are important for employees and customers in organizations they engage with?

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. John Rice
Dr. Peter Fieger
Dr. Bridget Rice
Dr. Nigel Martin
Guest Editors

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• sustainable-HRM
• employee values
• sustainable organizational systems
• sustainable management