Corporate sustainability, organizational resilience, and corporate purpose: a review of the academic traditions connecting them

Abstract

The increasing complexity of economic, environmental, and social systems causes crises, uncertainty and risk to become common global issues, and organizations that want to achieve long-term prosperity must pursue corporate sustainability, i.e., the joint pursuit of environmental, social, and economic goals, in order to successfully face the complex and uncertain environment in which these organizations find themselves. To achieve the above, organizational resilience would also seem to be critical, as it is a capacity which enables the organization to build a risk-aware culture that helps it better position itself to deal with the demands of high-impact events as well as to be able to find opportunities through uncertainty. Yet, both corporate sustainability and organizational resilience are organizational capabilities that can nourish (and/or be nurtured by) a corporate purpose that leads organizations to have a clear and inspiring sense of direction, fostering the development of strong responsible and adaptive behaviors. Nevertheless, the academic traditions that relate and explain “how” these concepts are related are non-existent. To bridge the above gap, we conducted a science mapping analysis and discovered that by 2022, a total of 34 documents had presented the relationship between sustainability, organizational resilience and corporate purpose. The analysis of these 34 papers yields five different academic traditions from which the relationship between these three concepts has been studied and reveals several gaps that future research should address to gain a holistic understanding of the interconnectedness of these three concepts to help organizations achieve long-term prosperity.