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University of St. Gallen

Chair of Sustainability Management

Our chair conducts research on the strategic management of corporate sustainability. Corporate leaders like CEOs, top managers, and board directors are faced with decisions about how to create value from addressing major sustainability topics that affect business such as pollution, emissions, and waste created through industrial and agricultural processes, rapid biodiversity loss, and land use changes. We consider what business models are most effective to address sustainability, the corporate governance of sustainability strategy, and the influence of stakeholders.

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Research Focus

on the topic of corporate sustainability management

Sustainability strategy and governance

Organisations apply sustainability models, frameworks, and measures to design sustainability strategy and implement sustainability governance systems and structures. Our work evaluates existing models and measures, and develops new ones, such as for biodiversity, and evaluates their effectiveness for sustainability transformation in business.

Micro-foundations of sustainability leadership

Microfoundations research considers the individual level psychological drivers of action at the organisational level, while considering the influence broader sociolo- gical contexts can have. Through innovative measures of psychological attributes of CEOs, top management teams, and board directors, we employ panel data regression as well as experiment techniques to understand why, how, and when leaders drive action for sustainability.

Systemic sustainability transformation

Organisations increasingly adopt holistic and circular economy approaches for transformative sustainability. Our work applies systems thinking, circular business models, and stakeholder collaboration to understand what drives systemic change for a more sustainable future of business and society.

Ongoing Projects

Chair for Sustainability Management

Corporate Biodiversity Governance

Biodiversity is rarely addressed in corporate environmental governance. Yet, biodiversity in ecosystems represents the variety of all life on Earth that supports vital functions like pollination, water purification, nutrient cycling, and climate regulation. Since nature has a distant and indirect impact on corporations, we consider how and when corporate leaders attend to biodiversity.

More about our biodiversity research here.

Green transformational leaders

Addressing environmental challenges requires companies to take transformative actions that enable the transition to a circular economy (CE). Corporate executives play a central role in this process. This project aims to understand why, when, and how organizational leaders engage stakeholders to tackle grand environmental challenges in CE. In this project, we clarify the construct of green transformational leaders (“GTLs”) and seek to understand how such GTLs motivate and enact change among networks of external stakeholders for environmental sustainability. We propose that doing so requires the following: 1) Individuals with specific motivations and characteristics become GTLs under certain conditions. 2) Specific mechanisms that help GTLs build relationships with external stakeholders. 3) Dedicated processes through which GTLs orchestrate stakeholder networks to create joint value for stakeholders and nature.

More Projects

SCOPES – Swiss Consumer Perception of Sustainability

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Studies of contested industries

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Deforestation Risks in Supply Chains

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Let's change the world together

Team

A strong vision needs a strong team

Top leader`s influence on business sustainability

What traits and characteristics can we look for in leaders that indicate that they will move their companies towards better social and environmental performance?

Latest Publications

P.J. Stephenson and Judith Walls call for a “new biodiversity paradigm for business.” They show that current corporate guidelines for engaging on biodiversity are inconsistent and confusing, leaving companies unable to manage nature-based risks, capture nature-based opportunities, and prevent disruptive climate change. To correct these inconsistencies, they identify fundamental issues that businesses and other actors must resolve in the links between market systems and the nature systems that generate biodiversity.

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get_appJames Combs, Peter Jaskiewicz, Rahul Ravi, Judith Walls
Journal paper
Family firms take different strategic actions because of their desire to grow and preserve socioemotional wealth (SEW) but pursuing SEW also generates what we call SEW resources that deliver advantages in certain contexts. We develop and test this idea with respect to corporate social responsibility (CSR). We theorize that SEW resources such as reputation, strong stakeholder relationships, and long-term orientation help family firms better leverage symbolic CSR to enhance short-term firm performance and better leverage substantive CSR to enhance long-term firm performance. Regression analyses on a 20-year panel of S&P 500 firms provide supportive evidence. Findings indicate that family firms not only “do it differently” to preserve SEW; they sometimes “do it better” because of SEW.

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get_appPJ Stephenson, MC Londoño-Murcia, PAV Borges, L Claasens, H Frisch-Nwakanma, N Ling, S McMullan-Fisher, JJ Meeuwig, KMM Unter, Judith Louise Walls, IJ Burfield, D do Carmo Vieira Correa, GN Geller, Paredes I Montenegro, LK Mubalama, Y Ntiamoa-Baidu, I Roesler, F Rovero, YP Sharma, N Wisesa Wiwardhana, J Yang, L Fumagalli
Journal paper
Many stakeholders, from governments to civil society to businesses, lack the data they need to make informed decisions on biodiversity, jeopardising efforts to conserve, restore and sustainably manage nature. Here we review the importance of enhancing biodiversity monitoring, assess the challenges involved and identify potential solutions. Capacity for biodiversity monitoring needs to be enhanced urgently, especially in poorer, high-biodiversity countries where data gaps are disproportionately high. Modern tools and technologies, including remote sensing, bioacoustics and environmental DNA, should be used at larger scales to fill taxonomic and geographic data gaps, especially in the tropics, in marine and freshwater biomes, and for plants, fungi and invertebrates. Stakeholders need to follow best monitoring practices, adopting appropriate indicators and using counterfactual approaches to measure and attribute outcomes and impacts. Data should be made openly and freely available. Companies need to invest in collecting the data required to enhance sustainability in their operations and supply chains. With governments soon to commit to the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, the time is right to make a concerted push on monitoring. However, action at scale is needed now if we are to enhance results-based management adequately to conserve the biodiversity and ecosystem services we all depend on.

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get_appGregory M. Mikkelson, Miron Avidan, Aleksandra Conevska, Dror Etzion
Journal paper
Previous studies have explored connections between environmental responsibility and the financial performance of business firms. Here, we explore connections between a particular form of environmental responsibility, divestment from fossil fuel, and the reputational status of a different form of organisation, universities. We find a strong and robust link between world university rankings and commitments to divest endowments from the fossil fuel industry, with higher-ranked universities divesting at higher rates compared to lower-ranked universities. Rates of divestment also differ significantly between countries, and according to the political orientations of provinces and states. We do not find evidence for links between divestment treated as a binary variable and a university’s number of students, size of endowment, or type of endowment. We use time lags to test whether the rank-divestment correlation may arise due to effects of rank on divestment and/or vice versa. These tests indicate influence in both directions. In light of these results, we predict universities that have not yet divested will face mounting peer pressure to do so. Social media summary. Higher-ranked universities divest more frequently, and divesting universities improve more in the rankings.

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In mid-2020, leaders in the field of organizations and the natural environment convened for a conference call to assess the field as it stands and consider reorientations that might elevate its scholarship and amplify its impact. On the call were: Tobias Hahn (ESADE), President of GRONEN, the Group for Research on Organizations and the Natural Environment1 Jennifer Howard-Grenville (Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge), Deputy Editor of Academy of Management Journal. Tom Lyon (University of Michigan), President of ARCS, the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability Mike Russo (University of Oregon), Editor-in-Chief of Organization & Environment Judith L. Walls (Institute for Economy and the Environment, University of St.Gallen), Chair of the Organizations and the Natural Environment Division of the Academy of Management1 What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our free-flowing conversation, with references that came up in the discussion added.

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Arguments based on ethical sensitivity differences, gender-based functional differences, and gender discrimination suggest that having more women on the board of directors improves corporate environmental actions (CEA). However, empirical evidence of this relationship has provided inconsistent results. To explore this inconsistency, we draw on critical mass theory to examine how women on boards influence CEA. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms during 2010–2016, we find that firms with a critical mass of at least three female directors on their boards engage in both higher quality and faster speed of environmental actions. In addition, we find that government monitoring (as a formal institution) positively moderates this relationship. We also find that local religious ideology (as an informal institution) positively moderates the relationship between critical mass of women on the boards and CEA speed. Our findings provide insights about gender diversity on boards to corporations and policymakers.

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Business-as-usual is likely to drive us to an unsustainable world. To solve the problems human industrial activity has created, such as climate change, species extinction, and biodiversity loss, business leaders (CEOs, top managers, and boards of directors) must be central to the solution for corporate sustainability (CS). In particular, ‘heroic’ leaders are needed to transform their companies into business beyond usual. In this essay, we briefly outline what researchers already know about microfoundational or socio-cognitive and motivational underpinnings of leaders that affect CS. However, gaps remain in our understanding of affective drivers and values of leaders. We question whether microfoundations research has the potential to understand true business transformation for positive deviance and suggest that positive organizational scholarship and research on sustainability change agents can provide insights. We next highlight how empirical and research design shortcomings might be addressed. Finally, we discuss how to identify, develop, and empower leaders with transformational potential so that we can proactively create heroic leaders rather than wait for them to magically appear.

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get_appMiron Avidan, Dror Etzion, Joel Gehman
Journal paper
How do the material aspects of intermediary work affect regulators, targets, and beneficiaries? To shed light on this question, we studied an information intermediary in the form of a website and the organizations who founded it. Specifically, we analyzed FracFocus, a self-regulatory initiative with strong industry ties, charged with disclosing data pertaining to the chemicals used in oil and gas wells completed using hydraulic fracturing technology (fracking) in the United States and Canada. We found that between 2010 and mid-2017, the vast majority of legislation in states and provinces where fracking actively occurred was updated to mandate or encourage disclosure via FracFocus, meaning that it had a considerable effect on the trajectory of official regulation on fracking disclosure. We also found that FracFocus disclosed important data but did so in a manner that limited accessibility and reduced the comprehensibility of environmental and public health risks to beneficiaries. Our analysis suggests that the public’s experience of such a device is one of opaque transparency, in which the line between official and non-official regulation is blurred. We traced these outcomes to the material affordances created by FracFocus.

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home Our Address

University of St. Gallen (HSG)
Institute for Economy and the Environment
Müller-Friedberg-Strasse 6/8
9000 St. Gallen

phone Contact

Doris Hoevel
Administration
Tel: +41 71 224 2584

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