Abstract
Organizations are increasingly seeking Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSSs) to concretize their organizational sustainability commitment on products, production, and services to their stakeholders via external communications and reporting. However, one of the key aspects of VSSs’ success, individual-level behavioral effectiveness, is rarely addressed in academic research, and VSSs are widely criticized as only plaques rather than genuine actions with on-the-ground behavioral change. This paper closes this research gap by conducting a case study of a specific VSS in the real estate sector: green building certification - Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). We adopted a qualitative content analysis method, aligning the intents underpinning each credit of LEED certification with a taxonomy of Employee Green Behaviors (EGBs). We explore how EGBs can contribute to the substantive implementation of LEED requirements in organizational contexts. Based on the analysis, we propose a four-step VSS-EGB Alignment Approach for practitioners, in which enactment of post-certification implementations will help to achieve the intended purposes embedded in the VSSs. Based on the findings, we suggest VSSs-setting organizations should involve employee-level representatives in the standards design and governance to ensure the VSSs’ operability in real-world business. We also recommend that organizations assign VSS-related tasks to relevant personnel to trickle down green transformation from senior management to employees in order to achieve substantive adoption of VSSs.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Human Impacts and Responsibility
KEYWORDS
Employee Green Behavior, Organisational Environmental Sustainability, Voluntary Sustainability Standards, LEED
