The complexities of perceived and empirical reality on environmental performance: Industrial case studies in china, Lithuania and Poland

Abstract The culture of a company is often cited as the basis for how well that company performs both economically and environmentally. This can also lead to the development and adoption of generic management approaches that fail to adequately acknowledge the existence of multiple cultures within the organization or the potential disjuncture between how performance is perceived by personnel and any attempts to measure that performance in an ‘objective’ manner. This failure to respond to the complexity of multiple cultures and perceived performance and the instigation of over‐arching management systems can discourage constructive dissent and hinder the related capacity for innovation and improvement. This paper draws upon research into the level of congruence between perceived and objective measures of environmental performance in thirteen factories from the heavy industrial sector in China and Eastern Europe. It presents findings that suggest managerial interactions, both laterally and vertically, are med...

[1]  Lynda Mugglestone,et al.  An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2nd edn , 2003 .

[2]  J. Alexander,et al.  Images of Organization , 1988 .

[3]  K. Cameron,et al.  Diagnosing and changing organizational culture , 1999 .

[4]  P. Heugens,et al.  A Neo-Weberian Theory of the Firm , 2005 .

[5]  Yishai Tobin,et al.  Semiotics and Linguistics , 1990 .

[6]  R. Merton.  Social Theory and Social Structure , 1958 .

[7]  C. Mills,et al.  Essays in Sociology. , 1947 .

[8]  Geert Jacobs.  Anna Wierzbicka. Cross-cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction , 1995 .

[9]  P. Chapman,et al.  A critical evaluation of safety (uncertainty) factors for ecological risk assessment , 1998 .

[10]  Margaret S. Archer.  Culture And Agency: Contents , 1996 .

[11]  Antony Flew,et al.  Hume on Knowledge , 2001 .

[12]  Gary L. Neilson,et al.  The PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE Organization , 2005 .

[13]  R. Dubin.  Industrial Workers' Worlds: A Study of the “Central Life Interests” of Industrial Workers , 1956 .

[14]  M. Alvesson.  Understanding organizational culture , 2002 .

[15]  Roy Lubit.  The keys to sustainable competitive advantage: Tacit knowledge and knowledge management: , 2001 .

[16]  John Ramsay,et al.  Trope Control: The Costs and Benefits of Metaphor Unreliability in the Description of Empirical Phenomena , 2004 .

[17]  D. Sperber,et al.  Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach , 1998 .

[18]  Pertti Alasuutari.  Researching Culture: Qualitative Method and Cultural Studies , 1995 .

[19]  P. Senge.  THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE , 1997 .

[20]  M. Lounsbury,et al.  From King to Court Jester? Weber’s Fall from Grace in Organizational Theory , 2005 .

[21]  Jeffrey C. Alexander,et al.  Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies , 1989 .

[22]  Juan Antonio Fernandez.  The Gentleman’s Code of Confucius: Leadership by Values , 2004 .

[23]  A. Wierzbicka.  Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction , 1992 .

[24]  J. Locke,et al.  The second treatise of government , 1952 .

[25]  J. B. Hunt,et al.  The relationship between organisational culture, organisational climate and managerial values , 1999 .

[26]  Rob Paton,et al.  The New Management Reader , 1996 .

[27]  Jeffrey C. Kennedy,et al.  Examining the Preferences of Influence Tactics in Chinese Societies: A Comparison of Chinese Managers in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China , 2004 .

[28]  Stephen Sutton,et al.  Cambridge Handbook of Psychology, Health and Medicine: Theory of planned behaviour , 2007 .

[29]  Shenghua Yan.  Problems That Lead to the Failure in Language Communication , 2007 .

[30]  Peter J. Frost,et al.  Reframing organizational culture , 1991 .

[31]  Mitsuru Wakabayashi,et al.  A comparative study of organizational context factors for managerial career progress: focusing on Chinese state-owned, Sino-foreign joint venture and Japanese corporations , 2004, Human Resource Management in China Revisited.

[32]  Hui Wang,et al.  "Let a thousand flowers bloom": Variation of leadership styles among Chinese CEOs , 2004 .

[33]  Xiaohang Wu,et al.  Achievement of Total Quality Is Impossibility , 2009 .

[34]  P. H. Lindsay.  Human Information Processing , 1977 .

[35]  Arnold M. Rose,et al.  Human Behavior and Social Processes , 2013 .

[36]  Bob Hodge,et al.  Understanding change in organizations in a far-from-equilibrium world , 2007 .

[37]  Mark Lemon,et al.  Perceptions and reality in quality and environmental management systems: A research survey in China and Poland. , 2008 .