Sustentabilidade corporativa e desempenho organizacional sob a ótica dos objetivos do desenvolvimento sustentável

Abstract

Discussions about sustainable development intensified mainly with the formulation of the Brundtland report in 1987, where a more grounded concept about the SD was exposed. Over the decades, companies understood their role as agents with an important part for the achievement of sustainable development, for which it is necessary to provide strategic plans capable of contemplating the social, environmental and economic factors linked to the organization, this vision was brought by Elkington (1999) with the Triple Bottom line (TBL) model for corporate sustainability. The inclusion of strategies of this nature in the corporate sphere is a generally complex fact, and the assessment of organizational performance is a fundamental mechanism for its achievement, an assessment that must go beyond purely financial aspects. In view of this, the following question arose in this study: How is the corporate sustainability of Brazilian companies listed on B3 related to aspects of their organizational performance? To this end, corporate sustainability was measured through the United Nations (UN) Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), launched in 2015. Therefore, the specific aims of this work were configured in: Measuring corporate sustainability through the identification of practices related to the SDGs (PRODS) performed by the companies in the study; Identify the aspects of organizational performance present in the reports of the organizations that make up the research; and Verify the level of use of aspects of organizational performance for each corporate sustainability degree (CSD). Then, a qualitative approach to research was carried out, through the application of content analysis technique in the sustainability reports of the companies that composed the sample, which made it possible to constitute the variables related to corporate sustainability and aspects of organizational performance, which were later used (quantitative approach) in statistical tests (Mann-Whitney (U) and Kruskal-Wallis), Fisher's exact test was also applied, in order to verify the association between each performance indicator with SC. The sample consisted of 100 companies that had their reports released in the period after the launch of Agenda 2030 (2016 to 2019), with 281 reports being investigated. The results indicate that in 67.97% of the reports there are mentions of the SDGs, with those referring to the economic dimension having the most evidenced practices 77.09%. By Kruskal-Wallis nonparametric test, together with the interpretation of box-plot, it was possible to infer that the higher the CSD submitted by the company, the greater will be the percentage of organizational performance aspects used by it. In this way, the results are aligned with the part of the literature that indicates a greater complexity of organizations with a higher corporate sustainability, leading them to include a greater number of aspects in the assessment of their organizational performance.