Culture Development for Sustainable SMEs: Toward a Behavioral Theory

Nuttasorn Ketprapakorn and Sooksan Kantabutra
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Nuttasorn Ketprapakorn: School of Business, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, Bangkok 10400, Thailand
Sooksan Kantabutra: Center for Research on Sustainable Leadership, College of Management, Mahidol University, Bangkok 10400, Thailand

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 9, 1-15

Abstract: The present study derives culture development practices among “sustainable” small and medium enterprises (SMEs)that adopt the Thai philosophy of the sufficiency economy. It adopts multiple data collection methods including non-participant observations made during visits to five “sustainable” enterprises, and references internal and published documents among other information about the case enterprises, including annual reports, previous studies about the companies and news reports. In-depth interview sessions were held with top management team members and employees, including CEOs or MDs, and division/functional heads. The “grounded theory” is adopted as an approach to analyze the data. The analysis reveals six emerging organizational culture development practices: identifying virtues, social and environmental responsibility and innovation as core values; leaders acting as models according to these values; growing their own managers to continue their corporate cultures; designing communication channels to emphasize the core values among employees; using the core values as criteria to recruit new employees; avoiding employee layoff to preserve the core values even in times of financial crisis. Limitations and future research directions to develop a behavioral theory of sustainability culture in organizational settings, as well as managerial implications are discussed.

Keywords: corporate sustainability; sustainability culture; sufficiency economy; culture development; Thailand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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