The Role of Organisational Culture in the Environmental Awareness of Companies

Zusammenfassung

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The objective of the article is to highlight the role of environmental values in corporate pro-environmental behaviour. Among the five components of corporate environmental awareness, environmental values are of special importance, as is illustrated by the organisational culture of a Hungarian company showing consistent pro-environmental behaviour regarding all awareness components except values. Empirical research findings - arrived at with the help of Q-methodology - indicate the need for a stable and unambiguous integration of environmental values into organisational culture in order to achieve consistent pro-environmental behaviour at companies.

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Auszug

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The Role of Organisational Culture in the Environmental Awareness of Companies

1. Introduction

Corporate environmental awareness can be analysed in several ways. One approach is to examine the consistency of organisational behaviour regarding the relationships of environmental awareness components. Based on the literature (Maloney/Ward 1973; Winter 1987; Urban 1986) five components of environmental awareness can be identified: ecological knowledge, environmental values, environmental attitudes, willingness to act and actual behaviour. These inter-related components form and reflect pro-environmental behaviour of both organisation members and the whole organisation. In the awareness-shaping process every component has a unique role which is hard to measure using a single methodology. In our experience, organisational ecological knowledge, environmental attitudes, willingness to act and environmental activity can be more or less observed via quantitative research techniques (Kerekes et al. 2003; Nemcsicsné 2005). On the other hand, the appearance and importance of environmental values and their influence on organisational behaviour can be more appropriately judged using qualitative methodology.

In this study, organisational culture serves as a framework for the examination of environmental values, as we are convinced that organisational culture reflects both the real and the declared values of the company and its members most realistically. During the empirical research we aimed to measure the influence of environmental values on the organisational behaviour, while filtering out the impacts exerted by ecological knowledge, attitudes, and willingness to act. For the qualitative analysis we have chosen a Hungarian company which shows consistent pro-environmental behaviour in the context of all environmental awareness components except values. Consequently, reflection of environmental values in the organisational culture of this company can be characterised independently from the other awareness components, and the outstanding importance of our value system in the actual behaviour can be highlighted.

2. Reflection of environmental values in the organisational culture of companies

Environmental values are part and parcel of our value system, so they are typically "durable concepts or convictions which relate to the desired behaviour, unfold in various s...

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