Does strategic alignment really matter in firm sustainability?: A survey of manufacturing firms

摘要

Sustainable development has drawn an enormous worldwide interest in the past decades from a wide range of academic disciplines and practice. Although sustainability is studied from different angles such as corporate responsibility, corporate social responsibility, corporate environmental responsibility, there are no comprehensive studies that take a holistic view of corporate sustainability and investigate the impact of corporate sustainability strategy on the firm's sustainability performance and its relation with other functional level strategies. Specifically, relatively less attention has been given to the role of operations strategy on the sustainability drives of a firm and its interface with corporate sustainability strategies. Integrating these disparate streams of research, this study attempts to investigate the question "How a firm can be successful at integrating sustainability concerns into strategic decision-making processes on various levels while still meeting its traditional business goals". The key objectives of this study are to explore conditions that influence the choice of corporate sustainability strategies and operations strategies of a firm and to analyze the impact of an alignment between corporate sustainability strategy and operations strategy of a firm on its sustainability performance. The findings of this study can potentially provide significant implications for operations management researchers and practitioners.