The Impact of Facility Culture Gestalts on Sustainability Management: Focusing on Environmental, and Occupational Health and Safety Management

Over the last few decades, sustainable development has received much attention globally. The objective of this study is to find the dominant gestalts of facility culture and the effect of different facility culture clusters on sustainability management and performance. In discovering the relationships among facility culture, social (in particular, occupational health and safety) and environmental practices and performance, we use the 5th round survey data collected by the Global Manufacturing Research Group. The clustering method is applied to discover dominant gestalts or archetypes of facility culture. Then, we conduct the Mann-Whitney U test to compare the differences of each cluster’s efforts to sustainability practice and performance. The archetype of long-term orientation, collaboration and motivated resource-centric norm was shown to be the most important cultural characteristics in both environmentally and socially sustainable management. Different from the extant studies on sustainability, our study examined the more comprehensive dimensions of facility culture to reveal dominant gestalts and their impact on environmental and social responsibility. Our empirical findings suggest cultural barriers or catalysts that affect the efficacy of sustainability strategies. The results provide important managerial insight into building the effective facility culture to enhance environmental, and occupational health and safety management systems, practices and performance.