Organizational Sustainability Management Framework: Structure, Content, Validation, and Operationalization

Many researchers and various organizations all over the world have made numerous efforts to include sustainability in the management systems; however, these efforts have not been fully successful in achieving the underlying goals, particularly due to the lack of a robust, standalone, holistic, reliable and adaptive framework for organizational sustainability. This dissertation aims to fill the research gap. Firstly, a comprehensive and systematic review is carried out, which targets organizational sustainability from three dimensions: academic literature on sustainability management and assessment, and standardized guidelines for incorporating sustainability in management systems. The review results in a robust structural-framework. Secondly, a practical perspective is brought to the mix; a content-framework is proposed as a result of the systematic review of 61 sustainability/annual reports of 20 most sustainable organizations, between 2013 and 2017. Thirdly, the two integrable frameworks are validated; face validation through expert judges (n=131) is carried out. The statistical (parametric and non-parametric) and discussion-based analysis provides conclusive evidence to establish the validity and comprehensiveness of the proposed frameworks. Lastly, this work emphasizes the importance of ‘safety’ (as a discipline) for sustainable development in organizations. Selected case studies are presented to identify an operational route for ‘sustainability’ in organizations through ‘safety’. The results of this dissertation can be used as a standalone resource for developing context-specific organizational sustainability management systems. In the future, this work can be extended further to an international standard of organizational sustainability management.