Today, Agenda 2030s Global Goals (SDGS.UN, 2021) focusing on sustainability is a major concern for organizations, and traditional financial measures are no longer adequate to determine an organization’s performance. Now, organizations need to include ecological and social sustainability measures.
Sustainable Quality Management (SQM) and Sustainable Quality Culture (SQC) are important aspects for organizations in striving to become more sustainable and to create social, societal and environmental values. SQM is based on the existence of a number of core values within an organization that builds the culture that is needed to ensure sustainable quality (Bergman & Klefsjö, 2020).
Organizations worldwide have increasingly constructed their work around teams. This shift in the structure of work has made teams an organizational concern (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006). Teamwork can be seen “as part of a value creation process that encompasses internal and external actors and influences how an organisation’s operations are structured” (Gremyr, Bergquist, & Elg, 2020, p. 111). Hackman (2002) stressed the importance of real teams for successful teamwork. A real team include following criteria: a team task, clear boundaries, specific authority to manage their own work processes and high membership stability (ibid.). Teams not meeting these criteria, are less efficient and less likely to realize the benefits derived from teamwork.
Previous research shows that leadership is the most crucial element of team effectiveness and performance (e.g. Hambrick, Humphrey, & Gupta, 2015) and that the top management team (TMT) is a key resource for an organization’s sustainability (Xu et al., 2019). The current understanding of how the TMT influence organizational strategy and performance is mainly based on the Upper Echelons Theory (UET) by Hambrick and Mason (1984) and later updated by Hambrick (2007). This theory suggests that demographic characteristics like age, gender, work experience, and education are reasonable proxies for the underlying differences in executives’ psychological attributes. In turn, these characteristics of top executives will ultimately manifest a firm’s strategic decisions and performance. Studying TMT characteristics can therefore become important when to understand how TMT manage towards creating a SQC.
Measuring is an important way for organizations to benchmark with other organizations but more importantly, to have a base for developing their own performance.
The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate an instrument, measuring SQC and characteristics of TMTs. This instrument, in form of a questionnaire, is a further developed version of a questionnaire about SQC, which has been tested in previous research (see for instance, Bäckström & Ingelsson, 2016). Adding perspectives about TMT can help widen the knowledge about how characteristics of TMT can affect how top management succeed in managing towards sustainable development and in creating a SQC.
This abstract relates mostly to the SDG target 8.1, which is in line with the track, Quality Management and Sustainability. Thus, this abstract contributes to new knowledge about how to measure SQC and characteristics of TMT.
2022.
28th annual International Sustainable Development Research Society ISDRS conference, Stockholm, June 15-17, 2022.