A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
Employee sensemaking on sustainability reports
Authors: Tiina Onkila, Marileena Koskela, Marko Järvenpää
Editors: European Academy of Management
Conference name: European academy of management annual conference
Publishing place: Valencia
Publication year: 2014
Journal: EURAM conference
Book title : EURAM2014 14th Waves and winds of strategic leadership for sustainable competitiveness
First page : 40
ISBN: 978-84-697-0377-9
This study asks how employees in two Finnish firms, in a financial and an energy company, make sense of the importance and the meaning of sustainability reports. Qualitative, in-depth interviews were conducted with 52 employees in these two organizations. The study contributes by identifying three positively laden (internal progress, external image construction, and implicit social contracts), two negatively laden (usability and artificial sustainability) and a neutral laden (information flow) frames of sensemaking used by employees on their employing organization’s
sustainability report. Within each of these frames, employees give different meanings to the sustainability report as well as construct different type of approaches to organizational identity. The sustainability reports were perceived often artificial and made merely for external purposes and thus they had only limited ability to construct the organizational identity, meanwhile everyday work and genuine sustainable actions were considered more important.