Measuring and improving environmental sustainability

Dilchert, S., & Ones, D. S.
In S. E. Jackson, D. S. Ones, & S. Dilchert (Eds.),
Managing human resources for environmental sustainability (pp. 187-221).
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley.
(2012)

A thorough understanding of how organizational activities can be managed in environmentally sustainable ways requires input from organizational and behavioral scholars and practitioners and needs to be based on individual and organizational level measurement. At the individual level, the degree to which employees contribute to or detract from environmental sustainability can be observed, measured, and influenced. At the organizational level, corporate environmental performance can be conceptualized and measured to help manage the triple bottom-line (Elkington, 1998, Savitz & Weber, 2006). The goal of this chapter is to highlight some of the ways that environmental sustainability has been conceptualized and measured at both levels, review approaches to positively impact environmental sustainability at the individual level, and summarize important variables that relate to it at the organizational level. It is hoped that this review will increase the knowledge base on and understanding of those issues, and that it will aid industrial and organizational psychologists in their efforts to improve environmental sustainability in organizations and their workforces.