Identification and alignment of the social aspects of sustainable manufacturing with the theory of motivation

Abstract

The relevance of adopting environmentally friendly manufacturing process to economic development has been studied and established in many research. Empirical studies have also confirmed that organisations adopting green technology or clean production are benefiting from increasing economic growth and job creation. However, the studies of the benefits of social development to economic growth and manufacturing sustainability have not been adequately captured or itemised in the literature. With the aim of contributing to this research streams, this paper applied the principles of social economy and reciprocity, and the theories of motivation and social exchange to guide the integration of social aspects into sustainability analytical equations. The Herzberg two-factor theory of motivation was adopted to classify the negative and positive social impacts of the workers' stakeholder category. Further, the approach aligns the Herzberg extrinsic factors with the negative and regulated social aspects and intrinsic factors with the positive and unregulated social aspects. This contribution provides an initial theoretical framework that will enable practitioners to capture and calculate the social impact coefficient of an organisation. The result can be used to assess the social impacts on productivity, and corporate social responsibility towards the employees. It will also provide an input for analytical or simulation models to assess the consequential effects of social aspects on other sustainability dimensions.