Sustainability and Digitalization: Behavioral Visibility explaining Organizational Change

Sustainability and digitalization are two megatrends posing an impetus for change and challenging organizations. Particularly in the case of sustainability, research emphasizes the impact of proactive employee actions for identifying and realizing sustainability change opportunities. However, it remains unclear why sustainability seemingly mobilizes more employee engagement, despite digitalization also offering opportunities for and benefitting from employee impulses. Building on a qualitative inductive study, we reveal how sustainability and digitalization can be successfully integrated into the organizational change management. Applying a behavioral visibility lens, we provide an explanation, why sustainability activates an additional emergent and employee-driven change, while digitalization does not, as sustainable behavior is more visible within the organization. We provide a model to understand the phenomenon of emergent vs. organizational change in the light of complex and diffuse megatrends, by explaining how behavioral visibility is a filter for enacting emerging change opportunities. We identify four different key parts for sustainability and digitalization change: 1) change enactment, 2) behavioral visibility, 3) emergent change cycle, and 4) organizational change. In addition, we derive managerial recommendations.