Sustainable Innovativeness and the Triple Bottom Line: The Role of Organizational Time Perspective

Journal of Business Ethics · 2018 · Volume 151 · Issue 4

Abstract

This paper studies the influence of an organization’s time perspective on triple bottom line deployment through sustainable innovativeness. Although academics increasingly consider sustainable innovation to be an essential element in deploying the triple bottom line, the degree of an organization’s sustainable innovativeness remains limited. Using ten inductive case studies based on the triangulation of data from multiple-respondent interviews and secondary data, this study shows that an organization’s time perspective plays a crucial role in explaining the organization’s degree of sustainable innovativeness and improvement of triple bottom line outcomes. Specifically, organizations with a longer planning horizon, higher tolerance of uncertainty, and greater ability to learn from the past develop a higher and increasing degree of sustainable innovativeness, allowing trade-offs between triple bottom line dimensions to be mitigated.

Keywords

Triple bottom line, Organizational time perspective, Sustainable innovativeness

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