Discourse: the Road to Corporate Sustainability

Abstract

The transition to corporate sustainability is a highly impactful part of organisational change, and is influenced by the way employees inhabit sustainability in their discourse. Within the domain of Corporate Sustainability, the role of leadership styles is not well-known. To.is thesis is about how discourse plays a role in leadership tactics within organisational change, such as a sustainable transformation, by conducting this study at Stahl Holdings. By analysing symbolic tactics, discursive tactics, and language types used by managers, directors and employees, the researcher was able to categorize them into the 33 Dragons of Inaction (Gifford, 2011). The methods used are inductive analysis of documents, and deductive analysis of interviews, cross-hierarchically and cross-departmentally. Four departments were analysed, namely the Sales dept., R&D, the Sustainability dept., and the Production dept. The discourse analysis showed that certain dragons of managers in the tactic level of the organisation affect sustainability research and development quantity, sustainability sales quality, and innovative work activities of production. Six leadership styles were included in the study, and it turned out that an Authorative-Pro-Sustainability leadership style would be most effective for Stahl's four departments.