Employees as Internal Stakeholders in the Concept of Sustainable Marketing - a Comparative Analysis of European and Asian Market

• Autorzy: Edyta Rudawska , Sudath Weerasiri , Małgorzata Wiścicka-Fernando
• Języki publikacji: EN

Abstrakty

EN

Background. Corporate sustainability has captured the attention of much of the world over the last few years. The idea of sustainability refers to all spheres of the company' activity, including marketing strategy. Before the company starts addressing sustainable marketing activities to external stakeholders effectively it needs to address them to its employees first. The reasons for that are two-fold. First, employees play a key role in the process of implementation of sustainable marketing strategies and programmes to external stakeholders, and thus they determine their effectiveness. Second, their sustainable behaviours performed in every-day work show that the company truly cares about sustainable development, and sustainable activities are not perceived as just cheap promotional, short-term actions. In this paper we assume that culture may differentiate employees' attitude towards sustainable marketing activities addressed to them and thus may differentiate sustainable marketing activities undertaken by company managers.
Research aims. To explore sustainable marketing activities used by companies towards employees in Europe and Asia, as well as to identify the differences in the assessment of the scope of implementation of these activities by enterprises operating in the European and Asian markets.
Methodology. The empirical part of the paper is based on research results run among 262 MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises) operating in Poland (a representative of the European market) and Sri Lanka (a representative of the Asian market). The respondents of the research comprised CEOs or CMOs. The research was run in 2016 and 2017. The non-parametric U Mann-Whitney test was used to examine the significance of the differences between the two countries. Factor analysis was also used to identify the way MSMEs in these two countries define sustainable marketing activities aimed at employees.
Key findings. The study revealed that differences between the two countries in relation to the assessment of sustainable marketing activities aimed at employees are statistically significant. Asian respondents assess them higher then Polish ones. To the best of the authors' knowledge this is the first in-depth study regarding the assessment of sustainable marketing activities aimed at employees. The study is a comparative analysis of the phenomenon between markets with different cultures - Poland (as an example of the European market) and Sri Lanka (as an example of the Asian market), which has not been previously researched. (original abstract)

Słowa kluczowe

EN

Sustainable development; Internal marketing; Employees' engagement; Stakeholders; Sustainable marketing; Comparative analysis; Mann-Whitney test

PL

Rozwój zrównoważony; Marketing wewnętrzny; Zaangażowanie pracowników; Interesariusze; Zrównoważony marketing; Analiza porównawcza; Test Mann-Whitney

• Czasopismo: International Journal of Contemporary Management
• Rocznik: 2018
• Tom: 17
• Numer: nr 4
• Strony: 301--322

Twórcy

autor

Edyta Rudawska

• University of Szczecin, Poland

autor

Sudath Weerasiri

• University of Kelaniya, Colombo, Sri Lanka

autor

Małgorzata Wiścicka-Fernando

• University of Szczecin, Poland

Bibliografia

• Allen, N. & Meyer, J.P. (1991). A three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment. Human Resource Management Review, 1(1), 61-68.
• Bourne, L. (2015). Making Projects Work. Effective Stakeholder and Communication Management. New York: CRC Press.
• Bresman, H. (2015). What millennials want from work, charted across the world. Harvard Business Review, 23rd Feb, 1-8, https://hbr.org/2015/02/what-millennials-want-from-work-charted-across-the-world (accessed: 15th Dec 2018).
• Carroll, A.B., Brown, J.A. & Buchholtz, A.K. (2016). Business & Society. Ethics, Sustainability & Stakeholder Management. Boston: Cengage Learning.
• Caruana, R. & Chatzidakis, A. (2014). Consumer social responsibility (CnSR): Toward a multi-level, multi-agent conceptualization of the "other CSR". Journal of Business Ethics, 121(4), 577-592.
• Certo, S. & Certo, T. (2009). Modern Management: Concepts and Skills. New Jersey: Pearson.
• Chakraborty, A. & Mandal, P. (2014). Understanding challenges of supply chain sustainability in Asia. International Journal of Management and Benchmarking, 4(1), 1-18.
• Christiansen, T., Kirchner, E. & Murray, P. (2013). Introduction. In: T. Christiansen, E. Kirchner & P. Murray (eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of EU-Asia Relations (pp. 1-11). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Cook, S. (2008). The Essential Guide to Employee Engagement. Better Business Performance through Staff Satisfaction. London: Kogan Page Limited.
• De Witt, B. (2017). Strategy Synthesis. Hamshire (UK): Cengage Learning.
• Eccles, R.G., Perkins, K. & Serafein, G. (2012). How to become a sustainable company? MIT Sloan Management Review, 53(4), 43-50.
• Freeman, R.E. (1984). Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Toronto: Pitman.
• Freeman, R.E., Harrison, J.S. & Wicks, A.C. (2007). Managing for Stakeholders. Survival, Reputation and Success. New Heaven: Yale University Press.
• Hair, J.F. et al. (2006). Multivariate Data Analysis. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
• Hill, L. et al. (2011). Employee green behaviors in Europe: A cross-cultural taxonomic investigation. In: S. Dilchert (Chair). Focusing on employees to achieve environmentally sustainable organizations. Symposium conducted at the 26th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Chicago (IL), http://doi.org/10.1037/e518362013-449 (conference presentation).
• Hillebrand, B., Driessen, P.H. & Koll, O. (2015). Stakeholder marketing: Theoretical foundations and required capabilities. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(4), 411-428.
• Hurth, V. & Whittlesea, K. (2017). Characterising marketing paradigms for sustainable marketing management. Social Business, 7(3-4), 359-390.
• Kahn, W.A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), 692-724.
• Kezar, A. (2012). Bottom-up / top-down leadership: Contradiction or hidden phenomenon. Journal of Higher Education, 83, 725-760.
• Kull, A.J., Mena, J.A. & Kirschun, D. (2016). A resource-based view of stakeholder marketing. Journal of Business Research, 69(12), 5553-5560.
• Kumar, V., Rahman, Z. & Kazmi, A.A. (2016). Stakeholder identification and classification: A sustainability marketing perspective. Management Research Review, 39(1), 35-61.
• Lawrence, A.T. & Weber, J. (2017). Business and Society. Stakeholders, Ethics, Public Policy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Lindfelt, L.-L. & Törnroos, J.-Å. (2006). Ethics and value creation in business research: Comparing two approaches. European Journal of Marketing, 40(3/4), 328-351.
• Liu, L. (2009). Sustainability: Living within one's own ecological means. Sustainability, 1, 1412-1430.
• Lozano, R. (2012). Towards better embedding sustainability into companies' systems: An analysis of voluntary corporate initiatives. Journal of Cleaner Production, 25, 14-26.
• Medhurst, J. (2007). A thematic evaluation of the contribution of structural funds to sustainable developments: Methods and lessons. In: U. Schubert & E. Stoermer (eds.). Sustainable Development in Europe: Concepts, Evaluation and Applications (pp. 143-163). Cheltenham-Northampton: E. Elgar.
• Norton, T.A., Zacher, H. & Ashkanasy, N.M. (2014). Organizational sustainability and employee green behaviour: The mediating role of work climate perceptions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 38, 49-54.
• Ones, D.S. & Dilchert, S. (2012). Environmental sustainability at work: A call to action. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 5, 444-466.
• Paillé, P. & Boiral, O. (2013). Proenvironmental behavior at work: Construct validity and determinants. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 36, 118-128.
• Peerenboom, R. (2003). Beyond the universalism and relativism: The evolving debates about "values in Asia". Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, 14(1), 1-85.
• Roberts, B. & Kanaley, T. (2006). Urbanization and sustainability in Asia. In: B. Roberts & T. Kanaley (eds.). Urbanization and Sustainability in Asia. Case Studies of Good Practice. Asian Development Bank: Philippines (pp. 13-40), https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/27965/urbanization-sustainability.pdf (accessed: 15th Dec 2018).
• Rogers, M. (2016). Six benefits of becoming a sustainable business. Environmental Leader, http://www.environmentalleader.com/2016/03/6-benefits-of-becoming-a-sustainable-business (accessed: 14th Dec 2018).
• Sachs, S., Rühli, E. & Kern, I. (2009). Sustainable Success with Stakeholders. The Untapped Potential. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Schnackenberg, A.K. & Tomlinson, E.C. (2016). Organizational transparency: A new perspective on managing trust in organization-stakeholder relationships. Journal of Management, 42(7), 1784-1810.
• Shekary, G. et al. (2012). The impact of internal marketing on organizational commitment in banking industry through structural equation modelling. Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business, 3(9), 21.
• Skowron, S. & Skowron, Ł. (2013). Employee and customer satisfaction as the source of company's wealth. In: E. Weiss & M. Pawęska (eds.). Enterprise - New Challenges, Theory and Practice (pp. 167-177). Alabama: York University.
• Sun, Y., Garrett, T.C. & Kim, K.H. (2016). Do Confucian principles enhance sustainable marketing and customer equity? Journal of Business Research, 69(9), 3772-3779.
• Tantalo, C. & Priem, R.L. (2016). Value creation through stakeholder synergy. Strategic Management Journal, 32(7), 314-329.
• Temminck, E., Mearns, K. & Fruhen, L. (2015). Motivating employees towards sustainable behaviour. Business Strategy & The Environment, 24(6), 402-412.
• United Nations Habitat (2012). Sustainable Urbanization in Asia. A Sourcebook for Local Governments, B. Barth & F. Cabrera (eds.), http://mirror.unhabitat.org/pmss/getElectronicVersion.aspx?nr=3345&alt=1 (accessed: 13th Feb 2018).
• Vallance, S., Perkins, H.A. & Dixon, J.E. (2011). What is social sustainability? A clarification of concepts. Geoforum, 42(3), 342-348.
• Wunder, T. (2017). Nachhaltige Geschäftsmodelle: Wirtschaftlichen mit gesellschaftlichem Mehrwert verknüpfen. Zeitschrift für Führung und Organisation, 86(6), 389-393.

Identyfikatory

DOI

10.4467/24498939IJCM.18.048.10034