Improving sustainability performance with management information models

Sammanfattning: PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discover how management information models provide organizations that have the will to perform sustainable, with a tool that gives them knowledge and practical guidance to reach sustainability and avoid the practice of greenwashing as a result. Therefore, the research question is: How can management information models serve as a tool to improve the sustainability performance and reduce the practice of greenwashing of an organization? Methods The authors approached this research from a balanced and pragmatic view. The primary data in the research is collected with a qualitative approach in the form of semi-structured interviews. The interviews are conducted with respondents from Swedish organizations in different sectors in order to increase the reliability of the study. The respondents are responsible for sustainability and management information models in their organizations. Findings The results present the need to enhance management information models by including the sustainability elements economic, social and environmental, also called the Triple Bottom Line (Elkington 1999). An evolution of the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan & Norton 1996) is needed to reach a management information models that improves the sustainability performance. In addition, this study shows the importance of including a knowledge section in such models. Also, it is of high importance to place the measured outcomes of sustainability in context in order to provide insight in the true impact of the sustainability performance of the organization. Implications The implications of this research consists of three theoretical implications and three practical implications. The three theoretical implications include the three core elements of a sustainability model, simplification of complex knowledge especially on the knowledge performance and prescribing only the essential elements of a model. The three practical implications exists of dividing the implementation into phases, ensure responsibility of sustainability on a high management level and integrate sustainability into culture. KeywordsSustainability; greenwashing; management information models; contextsustainability; knowledge.