Sustainable Workplaces as Innovation

Abstract

IntroductionACADEMIC RESEARCH AND POPULAR NEWS sources alike decry what has come to be called the "toxic workplace" (Chamberlain & Hodson, 2010; Williams, 2011; Morgan, 2013; Schwartz, 2014). As an environment, the toxic workplace includes an array of harmful working conditions ranging from hostile co-workers and insensitive bosses to chaotic and exploitative work environments. Awareness of the toxic workplace has become more pronounced since the great recession of 2008. As businesses downsized, there have been myriad reports that surviving employees are forced to work harder to offset the diminished worker population, and subjected to debilitating working conditions (Greenhouse, 2015, p. BU1; Sanger-Katz, 2015; Miller, 2015, p. A3). Worse, workers are trapped in bad jobs by a weak labor market.Yet, amid bad news on the labor front, here and there pockets of hopeful news have emerged. Some management scholars and a host of local and international social movement organizations are calling for action to promote more sustainable workplaces (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2007; Pfeffer, 2010; Spreitzer & Porath, 2012). They argue for conceptualizing sustainable workplaces in ways that go beyond eco-friendly environments to positive, regenerative environments for employees. Sustainable workplaces are viewed as an innovation, not so much of new products or new production processes, but as a change that entails decent treatment of employees (Ehnert & Harry, 2012).In this paper, we present an analysis of 60 interviews of small business owners that employed 1-100 employees. These firms were identified by local chambers of commerce, business organizations and business magazines as innovative businesses. Innovations included product, service and process types (Jurik, McGhee, & Bivona, 2010). In the course of interviews, we asked owners how they created innovative businesses. Over three-fourths of the 60 businesses credited the work environment that they had created for themselves and their employees. Upon a review of our findings and the growing body of literature on toxicity and its counterpart, sustainable work environments, we found that our sample of small businesses offered important insights into managerial strategies for building non-toxic work environments in small businesses. Some literature argues that sustainable work environments promote high employee work performance. Our data link such environments to business innovation.In the sections below, we discuss the literature on toxic and sustainable work environments followed by a discussion of our methodology and sample. We then present our analysis of owner narratives about the work environment. We found that 77% of owners stressed the importance of strategies in one or some combination of the following three realms: job dimensions, organizational level dynamics, and interpersonal interactions.Toxic vs. sustainable work environments: the literatureThe global recession that began in 2008 heightened the sense of insecurity, stress, and exhaustion that workers experience, and older terms such as burnout or rustout have reappeared in the literature (Docherty et al., 2007). Amid unemployment at rates not seen in decades, downsizing (even globally) is the "new normal," and workers have been stretched to and beyond capacity. Yet, workers are afraid to complain about, much less leave, a bad job because there are so few jobs. The situation is so dire that research decries that "Taylorism lives" (Kira, 2002; Crowley et al., 2010; Witzel & Warner, 2015), and there are increasingly allusions to the "toxic workplace" (Chamberlain & Hudson 2010).Recent years have been a time of much bad news in the workplace. The academic literature is replete with research about incivility and rudeness, even outright bullying in the workplace (Hutton, 2006; Tracy et al., 2006; Johnson & Indvik, 2001). U.S. businesses seem to be so obsessed with short-term financial gain that there is little concern about job insecurity, ill-health due to job-related stress, or any sense of work-life balance for workers. …