How Can Organizations Achieve Resilience and Sustainability through Corporate Purpose? A Comprehensive Literature Review

Abstract

The increased complexity of economic, environmental, and social systems causes crises, uncertainty, and risk to become common worldwide issues, and organizations that want to achieve long-term prosperity are required to pursue corporate sustainability, i.e., the jointly pursuit of environmental, social, and economic goals, to successfully face the complex and uncertain environment in which these organizations are embedded. For the above, organizational resilience seems to be also critical, as it is a capacity enabling the organization to build a risk-aware culture that helps it to be better positioned to deal with the demands of high-impact events as well as to find opportunities and gains through uncertainty. Yet, unsurprisingly, both corporate sustainability and organizational resilience are organizational capacities that are likely nurtured by a corporate purpose that makes organizations have a clear, inspiring sense of direction leading to the development of strong responsible and adaptive behaviors. Nevertheless, although corporate sustainability, resilience, and purpose (SRP) seem to form a triple, interlinked concept that explains how organizations can achieve long-term prosperity, the academic traditions that relate these concepts and explain “how” they are related, has not been addressed, and potential, insightful gaps have to be yet identified. The current comprehensive literature review will yield five different academic traditions from which the relationship between the concepts involved in SRP has been studied, and importantly, will suggest various gaps that future research should address to help organizations become more resilient and sustainable through having an authentic corporate purpose.

Keywords: Sustainability, Resilience, Purpose, Corporate, Literature review

JEL Classification: M10, Q01