Green Organizational Culture: A Review of Literature and Future Research Agenda

Abstract

Due to climatic changes across the globe, alignment of processes and products according to international environment standards is a rising concern for business stakeholders. Though this reform process to minimize environmental impact is occurring across different industries and countries but at a varying pace. Therefore, environmental management is still naïve and often compromised. If it is left unaddressed, it would lead to massive protests and social movements in future which will be messy to deal with, since climate change is occurring at an alarming pace. Moreover, the environmental consciousness is rising among masses, it is inevitable to deceive stakeholders for long time in this information era where controlling information is impossible. Corporate scandals and information/data leaks regarding greenwashing can lead to social protests and corporate defamation. Although in most of the countries environmental reporting is not a legal requirement however it is a societal requirement in different communities. Organizations use obfuscation eco-friendly claims, vague visual imagery, selective disclosure of corporate reports, and misleading communication modes to intentionally portray false environment-friendly claims of poor environmental performance to maintain positive social image by deceiving stakeholders. These symbolic strategic practices have stark difference with the real environmental impact. human resource managers and employees play significant role in developing and implementing such environment friendly organizational culture. Therefore, human resource function can facilitate by designing systems to build green organizational culture in organizations. In this research paper the pre-existing literature on green organizational culture in organizations is be reviewed, since in the last decade many researches were conducted on this issue. This review will give a holistic view of existing literature to the future researchers and will help them to identify research gap. Moreover, it will help practitioners and decision makers in knowing the advantages and disadvantages of green culture in organizations, so that they will understand whole impact of opting it.

Keywords: green organizational culture, sustainability culture, triple bottom line (TBL), pro-environmental/ environment friendly organizational culture, eco-friendly organizational culture