Employee-Driven Sustainability Performance Assessment in Public Organisations

Vera COUTINHO, Ana Rita DOMINGUES, Sandra CAEIRO, Marco PAINHO, Paula ANTUNES, Rui SANTOS, Nuno VIDEIRA, Richard M. WALKER, Donald HUISINGH, Tomás B. RAMOS*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

34 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Organisations are increasingly adopting sustainability performance assessment tools. However, these formal organisational sustainability assessments are typically managed and prepared by technical staff. There is a lack of research on approaches that enable a stakeholder-driven performance assessment. This paper develops a framework of informal/complementary stakeholder-driven sustainability performance assessment, from the perspective of employee voluntary collaboration. The framework composes a checklist of questions covering the main sustainability domains: perceptions, individual practices, and voluntary monitoring indicators. In an exploratory case study in a public organisation, the checklist was evaluated by employees in a participatory workshop. The evaluation criteria of understanding and usefulness were rated more positively than reliability. This paper shows a novel way of integrating employee inputs for informal sustainability assessment and supports the importance of empowering public organisations, thereby increasing their understanding of sustainability management frameworks. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)29-46
Number of pages18
JournalCorporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management
Volume25
Issue number1
Early online date29 Jul 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2018
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

The authors also acknowledge the collaboration of General Direction of Arms and Defence Infrastructure (DGAIED) belonging to Portuguese Ministry of Defence (MDN) for their valuable contribution to testing and validating the conceptual framework. The funding sources or the collaborative organisation played no part in the design, analysis, interpretation, or writing-up of the paper or in the decision to publish. Finally, the authors also acknowledge the helpful comments from three anonymous reviewers.

Keywords

  • empowerment
  • internal stakeholders
  • performance assessment
  • public organisations
  • sustainable development

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Employee-Driven Sustainability Performance Assessment in Public Organisations'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this