Collaboration for organizational sustainability limits to growth: Developing a factors, benefits, and challenges framework

Abstract

[Abstract] Collaboration plays a key role in the contribution of organizations (civil society, corporate, and public sector ones) to sustainability; nonetheless, there has been limited research on collaboration elements, benefits, and challenges. A survey was developed for investigating collaboration for organizational sustainability (through elements, benefits, and challenges), to which 253 full responses were obtained. The survey responses were analyzed using Friedman tests, correlations, and multivariate statistical analyses. The results provide insights into the rankings of the elements, benefits, and challenges. The multivariate statistical analyses show that when organizations increase their collaboration on two element factors (business-oriented and society-oriented), there will be both benefits and challenges. The optimal solution to collaboration for organizational sustainability is where the factors are balanced in such a way that there are sufficient benefits but fewer challenges. If collaboration is unbridled, then the challenges will outweigh the benefits, thus there are limits to the implementation and growth of collaboration. From the analyses, the research proposes the “Organizational sustainability collaboration” framework dependent on the factors, the benefits, and the challenges obtained from collaborating, which can help organizations understand and better collaborate, so that benefits are maximized, and the challenges curtailed.