BUSI 504 Week 8 Discussion Board Forum 4 Example

Discussion Board Forum 4: Greenwashing as a Failure of Implementation

BUSI 504 Leading Organizational Change, Discussion Board Forum 4 Thread and Replies

Thread by [Student Name]

The choice of term, the coffee chain and the three classmates are composites; the textbook, the research articles, the book and the Scripture cited are real, and the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 504.

Thread

Two years ago Harbor Roast, a composite regional coffee chain, announced that every cup would be compostable and that its stores would reach zero waste by 2030. The cups were real, but most of the chain's cities had no commercial composting facility, and store managers received no new bins, contracts or training. The compostable cups went into the same dumpsters as before. When a local reporter asked, the company pointed to its sustainability page.

For Delmas and Burbano (2011), greenwashing happens where weak environmental results meet flattering talk about those results. They locate its drivers at three levels: external pressures such as lax regulation and consumer demand for green products, organizational factors such as incentives, culture and weak coordination across departments, and personal habits of mind like optimistic bias and narrow decision framing. Harbor Roast fits their organizational account: marketing moved faster than operations, and no one owned the gap. The sustainability announcement came from the brand team, the purchasing department bought the new cups and the store operations group, which would have had to find composting partners city by city, learned about the goal from the press release.

Bromley and Powell (2012) distinguish policy-practice decoupling, in which an organization adopts a policy but never implements it, from means-ends decoupling, in which practices are implemented but only loosely connected to the outcomes they claim to produce, and they argue that the second form has become increasingly common as organizations face pressure to show measurable results. Harbor Roast's cups are a case of the second kind: the practice existed, but it did not reduce waste. Scrutiny can narrow such gaps. Marquis et al. (2016) studied environmental disclosure by thousands of public companies in dozens of countries and found that firms facing more scrutiny and stronger global norms were less likely to disclose selectively.

This is where Spector (2013) applies directly. A change that lives in announcements rather than in structures, roles, incentives and daily behavior is not implemented, however sincere the leaders may be. Seen this way, much greenwashing is less a lie than a failed change: the vision was declared before the redesign and alignment work was done. Harbor Roast could still repair the damage by pausing the claim, assigning one executive to own the waste goal, signing composting contracts in the cities where facilities exist and reporting honestly on the rest.

Scripture sets a simple standard. Jesus warned against embellished promises and asked that a person's word simply match the truth (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Matthew 5:37). For a company, that means making environmental claims only as fast as operations can keep them.

Reply to Hannah

Hannah, your thread on the triple bottom line explained the case Elkington (1997) made that companies should account for social and environmental results alongside profit, and I liked your point that what gets measured gets managed. My concern, after researching greenwashing, is that the triple bottom line can become a reporting exercise rather than a management system. Bromley and Powell (2012) describe exactly this risk when they discuss means-ends decoupling: organizations can produce impressive sustainability reports, complete with metrics, while the practices behind the numbers barely affect the outcomes. A company might report the number of compostable cups purchased, which rises every year, rather than the tons of waste actually diverted from landfills, which may not change at all. That kind of metric looks like the planet line of the triple bottom line but measures activity rather than impact. Your suggestion that managers' bonuses be tied to all three lines could help, as long as the environmental measures are outcomes rather than inputs. Spector (2013) makes a similar point about reinforcement in his chapter on rewards: what an organization pays for, it gets. If Harbor Roast had tied store managers' incentives to waste diverted, the compostable cups might have prompted managers to find composting partners rather than simply stocking new cups. I wonder whether the companies you studied measured outcomes or activities, because that distinction seems to separate firms that truly change from those that only report. A second safeguard would be outside verification of the environmental figures, since an auditor who counts tons of waste is harder to satisfy than a marketing team counting cups. It may also be the simplest test a board member or investor can apply when reading a sustainability report: ask what changed outside the building, not only what was purchased inside it.

Reply to Marcus

Marcus, your thread on sustaining change drew on Buchanan et al. (2005), whose review found that many organizational changes fade over time through what they call initiative decay, and that sustainability depends on factors at many levels, from the substance of the change and individual commitment to leadership, culture, politics and timing. I think their work explains a quieter form of greenwashing: environmental programs that were real at launch but decayed while the public claims stayed the same. A company might start a recycling program with enthusiasm, then lose the champion who ran it, cut the budget in a lean year and quietly stop sorting, all while the website still describes the program in the present tense. In that case the claim becomes false without anyone deciding to deceive. Your recommendation that sustainability goals be written into job descriptions and reviewed each year addresses exactly this risk, since it keeps responsibility from depending on one enthusiastic person. I would add a simple communication practice: any public environmental claim should have an internal owner who confirms once a year that it is still true. That small discipline would connect the review literature you used with the disclosure research I found, where scrutiny made firms more careful about what they claimed. Spector's emphasis on reinforcement suggests one more step, which is to celebrate and reward teams that keep a program alive in its third year, not only those that launch new initiatives, since the third year is when decay usually sets in. Buchanan and colleagues also note that the context around a change keeps shifting, so a program designed for one set of leaders and budgets may need deliberate redesign, not just maintenance, to survive the next set.

Reply to Olivia

Olivia, you argued that companies change their environmental practices mainly when outside stakeholders push them, and the research supports you with an important nuance. Henriques and Sadorsky (1999) surveyed Canadian firms and grouped them by environmental commitment, from reactive to proactive. They found that proactive firms perceived a wider range of stakeholders as important, including communities, employees and shareholders as well as regulators, while less committed firms paid attention to fewer groups. In other words, how a company reads its stakeholders seems tied to how seriously it changes. That fits the greenwashing research too: Marquis et al. (2016) found that scrutiny reduced selective disclosure, which suggests that stakeholders who ask hard questions can close the gap between claims and practice. For Harbor Roast, the most effective stakeholders might have been its own baristas, who saw the compostable cups going into the dumpster every night. Spector (2013) argues throughout the book that the people closest to the work often see problems first, and a company that invited employees to flag environmental claims that did not match practice would have an early warning system for greenwashing. Your example of the activist campaign against the apparel brand showed external pressure at its most visible; internal voice may be quieter but more continuous. Pairing the two, perhaps by inviting a local environmental group to review the employee reports each year, could give a company both the pressure and the information it needs to keep its claims honest. Psalm 24:1 declares that the world and all who live in it are the Lord's (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016), so stewardship is owed to him before it is owed to any stakeholder group, which may be the strongest reason for a Christian leader to make sure a company's green claims are true.

References

Bromley, P., & Powell, W. W. (2012). From smoke and mirrors to walking the talk: Decoupling in the contemporary world. Academy of Management Annals, 6(1), 483-530. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2012.684462

Buchanan, D., Fitzgerald, L., Ketley, D., Gollop, R., Jones, J. L., Lamont, S. S., Neath, A., & Whitby, E. (2005). No going back: A review of the literature on sustaining organizational change. International Journal of Management Reviews, 7(3), 189-205. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2370.2005.00111.x

Delmas, M. A., & Burbano, V. C. (2011). The drivers of greenwashing. California Management Review, 54(1), 64-87. https://doi.org/10.1525/cmr.2011.54.1.64

Elkington, J. (1997). Cannibals with forks: The triple bottom line of 21st century business. Capstone.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Henriques, I., & Sadorsky, P. (1999). The relationship between environmental commitment and managerial perceptions of stakeholder importance. Academy of Management Journal, 42(1), 87-99. https://doi.org/10.2307/256876

Marquis, C., Toffel, M. W., & Zhou, Y. (2016). Scrutiny, norms, and selective disclosure: A global study of greenwashing. Organization Science, 27(2), 483-504. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2015.1039

Spector, B. (2013). Implementing organizational change: Theory into practice (3rd ed.). Pearson.