Circular Economy adoption at Engie’s organisational culture

Abstract

Circular Economy (CE) is a tool for Corporate Sustainability (CS) that has gained popularity in the last years. Like with most CS initiatives, a supportive organisational culture is necessary to successfully adopt CE. However, current scientific literature does not provide an insight on what type of organisational culture would support CE adoption. This thesis aims to identify the changes necessary to an organisational culture for it to be supportive of CE adoption. For this purpose, literature review is used to provide an overview of CE and CE drivers, organisational change for CS and organisational culture. These aspects are integrated in a research framework. The research method was a case study and the grounded theory constant comparative analysis. This analysis used secondary data, mainly interviews with the organisation’s employees and with two employees of an external stakeholder. The results show that multiple drivers exist for CE adoption, the most important being customer satisfaction and on a second place, competitors’ benchmarking. This indicates that the organisation might be customer and externally focused. Sustainability values would support CE adoption, while values such as risk aversion, customer-focus, money-focus and reactive attitudes within the organisation need to be changed in order to adopt CE. Money-focus values should be substituted with holistic thinking values. The organisation should also have a more proactive, innovative and long-term thinking mind-set. Employees’ preconceptions that CS and CE are expensive or “something extra” should be changed. This thesis has developed a CE drivers’ model and it has highlighted the importance to undertake organisational culture change when aiming to adopt CE within the organisation. Further research is required to be able to generalise these findings as well as to explore the influence of the existing organisational culture in the perception of the change drivers.