Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-1-2016
Abstract
Business enterprises are investing in major sustainability initiatives; yet, often they do not know what are the financial benefits or outcomes of these activities. While managers may have an intuitive sense that “doing well by doing good” does yield financial rewards, they cannot pinpoint the specific effects on financial performance. There is extensive literature that focuses on non-financial measurements of sustainability initiatives. However, relatively little research exists that addresses related financial performance. I conducted a qualitative research study, using grounded theory methodology, to explore the experiences of business managers, advisors, and academicians who have responsibility for providing leadership in their respective organization’s sustainability initiatives. My objective was to better understand how these individuals and their organizations think about sustainability outcomes from a financial perspective. I discovered that although businesses may ‘think about’ financial performance metrics to monetize sustainability outcomes, few organizations are actively trying to account for resulting financial value. I wondered why this is so? And if organizations are not measuring sustainability financial impacts, what is the spark that causes them to remain engaged in a deep sustainability commitment? Utilizing existing theory together with rigorous analysis of my research data, I propose a new hypothesis about how certain business organizations—those that have embedded a cultural ‘ethos of sustainability’—may have developed a unique resource that itself can lead to better financial performance. These findings are important to practitioners and academicians who are responsible for sustainability success within their organization or field of research.
Keywords
business enterprises, management, Weatherhead School of Management, corporate reporting, ethos, exemplar, financial performance, financial value, intangible assets, measurements, resource-based theory, social accounting, stakeholders, sustainability, sustainable development
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Levin, Matthew H., "Looking Beyond the Bottom Line: Connecting the Dots Between Business Enterprise Sustainability Initiatives and Growth in Financial Value" (2016). Student Scholarship. 290.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/290