Doing What Feels Right - The Role of Employees in Shaping Sustainability Practices

Abstract

In the light of the growing concern for sustainability, pressures influence individuals’ perception of their moral responsibility which motivates action. This thesis presents a qualitative case study focusing on the role of employees in how sustainability work unfolds in the absence of a corporate sustainability strategy. The findings suggest that individual actors engage in institutional work guided by their moral motivations for sustainability to settle the dissonance between their moral convictions for sustainability and the practices of the company. Institutionalization of norms is outlined as a collaborative process requiring negotiations, where employees aim to institutionalize sustainability alongside pre-existing norms and practices. However, several challenges were identified in relation to the complexity of sustainability, as well as the enabling and constraining structures of the institutional environment, as alignment of interests is difficult to achieve. Moral decoupling on an individual level occur as a means for self-preservation of the engaged actors. The work for institutionalization is dependent on the commitment and interests of individual actors, which are not fixed and needs to be considered. The contributions of this study have both theoretical and practical implications, which concern the integration of moral into institutional work theory as well as a better understanding of how employees drive sustainability work within companies.