Relationen mellan anställdas motivation och syn på hållbar utveckling i företag

Sammanfattning: The current way of life poses a major threat to humanity's continued existence on earth. In order to protect the remaining ecosystems, business plays a crucial role. Thus, individuals' ways of driving sustainability development within companies will affect how large the climate change will be. The aim of this study is to investigate whether employees´ motivation correlates with their views on sustainability development in companies. The study is based on a questionnaire, sent to various companies and networks in Sweden. The results are based on the answerers from 85 participants. The study is also analyzing the words used by participants in questions regarding sustainability. The word based analysis was done with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Word plots were used to visualize which words the participants chose to use for the answers to the open sustainability questions. Some examples of words from the plots were: recycling, electric cars, initiative, missing, waste and circular. The study identified a correlation between employees' motivation in relation to their view of the sustainability work in the company they are employed at. There was no association regarding their motivation and view of sustainability work for Swedish companies in general. In this study we found an association between employees´ inner motivation and the view of sustainable development in the company on which the employee works, with a correlation of (r = .42 , p < .001). We also identified a relationship between employees' basic psychological needs, which are necessary for their motivation, and their view of sustainable development in the company they work for with a correlation of (r = .43 , p < .001). This study contributes with another perspective that possibly could enable an acceleration of the transition to a more sustainable society. The limited number of participants makes the study result uncertain, which therefore needs to be interpreted with some caution.