Exploring the nexus of organisational culture and sustainability for green innovation

Organisations have embraced green innovation, but the desired environmental impacts remain unrealised. We approach this problem by focusing on how a driver of green innovation, sustainability, relates to organisational culture. Prior research suggests that understanding culture is fundamental to managing sustainability, but empirical research relating the two concepts is lacking. Global Reporting Initiative documents and annual reports to shareholders from 197 organisations were examined via content analysis to measure their sustainability strength with the Stages of Sustainability model and to quantify their organisational culture profiles on the Competing Value Framework. Expectedly, organisations oriented towards Hierarchy, and Market typologies were purveyors of weak sustainability. Unexpectedly, Clan organisations were found to reduce weak sustainability while Adhocracy types had no significant effect on sustainability strength. These findings result in implications for shifting organisational culture for strong sustainability. This knowledge can be leveraged in future research to cultivate impactful green innovation.