A strategic model for sustainable business policy development

Abstract

Growing importance of sustainable development, corporate social responsibility and business ethics requires various types of contemporary organisations innovation. This research assesses the problem related to business policy innovation (BPI), which represents organisational governance determination. The main purpose of the paper is to qualitatively and quantitatively present a new, requisitely holistic strategic model of the soft factors influencing BPI, which interdependently incorporates changes in organisational values, culture and business ethics, as well as stakeholders' interests reconciliation, thus determine soft possibilities for more sustainable business policy, management and practice. While the relevance of these factors for business policy is in the literature widely recognized, there is a small amount of empirical research on their influence on BPI. To mitigate this research gap, advanced structural equation modelling (SEM) based partial least squares (PLS) method was used for analysing data of 734 organisations in Slovenia, the EU state. The research results show that researched soft factors organisational values, culture and stakeholders' interests reconciliation statistically confirmed influence BPI. Thus, these recognitions can be used as the basis for strategic managerial decision making towards social responsibility and sustainability of an organisation. Reasons why it has not been statistically confirmed that business ethics influence BPI needs to be investigated in future research.