Opening the door to Corporate Sustainability - Identifying the factors for developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can benefit the integration of a Corporate Sustainability strategy in the organizational culture

Abstract

Organizations that want to pursue Corporate Sustainability need to integrate their sustainability strategy in the organizational culture. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be an important tool in measuring and executing a Corporate Sustainability strategy. Existing research has not sufficiently identified how KPIs can contribute to the integration of a Corporate Sustainability strategy in the organizational culture. Therefore, this thesis identifies which factors can benefit the development of KPIs for a Corporate Sustainability strategy and how they relate to organizational culture. By systematically reviewing existing case studies on KPIs for Corporate Sustainability and linking the results to the three different levels of organizational culture, an argument is developed on how KPIs can benefit the integration of Corporate Sustainability and organizational culture. By setting relevant inclusion and exclusion factors, eight articles were collected and analyzed. The results revealed five factors that can contribute to the identification and development of appropriate KPIs for a Corporate Sustainability strategy. These factors are: ‘Stakeholder engagement’, ‘Use of standard sets of KPIs (e.g. GRI)’, ‘KPIs tailor made to strategy and stakeholders’, Breaking KPIs down to global and local level’ and ‘Involving employees in the process’. These five factors act on all of the three levels of organizational culture; artifacts, espoused values and basic assumption. Therefore, these factors can benefit the integration of Corporate Sustainability in the organizational culture. Furthermore, the review of the selected articles showed that very different research methods and definitions for KPIs were used. It indicates that the field of KPIs and Corporate Sustainability is still young and could be more institutionalized. More research is necessary on the use of KPIs for measuring and executing Corporate Sustainability, as the literature has not sufficiently investigated this relation. The major implication of this research is that it contributes to our understanding of how KPIs can be the key to open the door to achieve Corporate Sustainability and how this relates to the concept of organizational culture.