Essays on Organizational Culture and Sustainability

The project examines organizational (culture) change in the area of environmental sustainability and beyond. The primary interest of the project lies in the interaction of top-down (i.e. leader-driven) and bottom-up (driven by organization members at lower levels of the organizational hierarchy) change efforts. It is crucial to develop a fuller understanding of this interaction as change efforts initiated from either the top or the bottom entail certain risks (such as threats to individuals' status or departures from the organization) that can hamper change implementation.
The role of organizational culture is of particular interest as culture comprises what actions organization members take in their day-to-day activities and the beliefs they have with regard to these actions. This is crucial for organizational change efforts in the area of sustainability as organizational culture can enable (or hinder) change.
As part of this, the project will also examine the role of different subcultures in change efforts to gain a fuller understanding of their interactions as well as the sense-making processes of members of subcultures regarding the organizational change.
To pursue this research, the project draws on and strives to contribute to the literatures on issue selling (i.e. how individuals advance issues within their organization), organizational culture (in particular the view of organizational culture as a toolkit) and systems thinking (with a particular interest in how different parts of complex systems interact and relate to one another).
In order to conduct my research, I will be using qualitative methods of data collection, starting with interviews and, as far as possible, (participant) observation. This will expose me to the "lived experience" of the members of the organization studied. Such a "deep dive" will allow me to, first, grasp the culture of the organization studied as fully as possible and, second, study the unfolding of processes, their (modified) repetition and the learnings organization members derive from them over time. Due to the current pandemic, observation and interviewing will be carried out remotely for the time being.
Over the course of the first year of the PhD, my supervisor and I have successfully negotiated access for an depth-study in line with the above description: the study is still in its initial stages, but will allow me to examine the change processes implemented at a large German organization in the chemical sector undergoing a planned culture change (of which embedding sustainability in the organizational culture constitutes an important part). Extensive data collection is expected to begin in late September / October 2020.
Furthermore, options for at least one additional empirical project are currently being explored.