Integration: The Route to Sustainable Behavior?

Academy of Management Annual Meeting,Montréal, 9th August 2010

Centre for Socio-TechnicalSystems Design

Matthew C. Davis

An Introduction

Human Behavior is Key• Tackling human behavioral issues is key to reducing energy use and waste

generation (e.g. Stern and Gardner, 1981, Steg and Vlek, 2009, Gardner and Stern, 2002, Milne and Boardman, 2000).

• Technological advances alone are unlikely to achieve the desired environmental gains (e.g. Davis and Challenger, 2009, Gardner and Stern, 2002).

• Psychologically based behavioral change techniques yielded positive results in domestic sphere.

• Such individual-level and group-level techniques under-utilized in organizational settings and in particular offices.

Human Behavior is Key

Reframing the Issue• Necessary to reframe the issue as more of a traditional organisational change

problem (e.g., Anderson & Bateman, 2000; Davis & Challenger, 2009).

• Process of encouraging Pro-Environmental Behaviors in the workplace can be compared to organizational change programs – technology led ones in particular.o i.e. experts design a solution and push it at end users

• “pull- based user-owned change” found to be more effective (Clegg & Walsh, 2004, p. 235).

• User involvement usually key to success.

Engagement

Lessons from IT Led Change

• Potential for technology to be seen as the panacea or primary tool.

• Many technological innovations turn out to be much less effective in practice than when they were conceived (e.g. Norman, 1998, Clegg, 2000).

• Potential analogies with “take-back-factor” in domestic energy studies (e.g. Milne and Boardman, 2000).

• Danger in narrowly conceived environmental change programs or corporate sustainability programs.

Socio-Technical Systems

• The integrated design of environmental change interventions, guided by socio-technical systems principles, may offer a solution.

• Socio-technical systems thinking (e.g. Cherns, 1976) emphasizes the joint consideration of multiple aspects of the system (e.g. the physical environment, work processes, organizational structure) and increases the likelihood of interdependencies being identified.

• Socio-technical theory acknowledges that design involves compromise, this can be viewed as part of the process that establishes a balance between competing elements of a work system (Clegg & Shepherd, 2007; Hendrick, 1997).

Socio-Technical Systems

Challenger et al., 2010, p.74

Schematic to illustrate the interdependency of organizational systems

Conclusions1. Lack of acknowledgement of the role of individual and group-level behavioral

issues in enacting pro-environmental behaviors in organizational settings and in particular offices.

2. A need for organizational researchers to capitalize on behavioral change techniques.

3. Act as a counterpoint to proliferation of otherwise techno-centric solutions.

4. Potential lessons to be learned from IT failures.

5. Opportunity to extend socio-technical design principles to this area and pursue a more integrated approach.

Conclusions

Part of the Process

Procedural

Convenient

Competitive

Feedback

Technologies

Employee Led

INTEGRATEDINTERVENTIONS

Adaption

Comments/Questions

Email: m.c.davis08@leeds.ac.uk

www.leeds.ac.uk/lubs/cstsd