Sustainability Development in India: The User Prospect

Abstract

Competitive business environment is been focusing on pertinent infrastructure, technology, economies transform themselves to adapt to the changing institutional environment, largely ignoring the sustainability aspect from the employee’s viewpoint. However, researchers opine that real improvement in sustainability cannot occur if the employee perception is not been considered. Employee’s perception is significant as it impacts their ‘buying behaviour’ as well as enables the employer provider to meet their expectations better, and provides relevant information to the policy makers to improve the sustainability, which lead the firm to achieve a proper ‘fit’ with the environment through changes in strategy (Summer et al., 1990; Zajac, Kraatz and Bresser, 2000).The main purpose of the current study is to assess the perception of employee towards the sustainability development of the automobile sector in northern zone based on the scale developed by Chow and Chen (2011) after making few amendments as per the requirement of the study on the sample of 300 employees. A response rate of 89 per cent was obtained resulting in 267 complete questionnaires. The 44-item scale employed in the study comprised 13 homogeneous sub-scales and tested well for reliability. The findings illustrated some interesting differences in employee perception regarding sustainability and how they varied between different automobile companies and according to the demographic status of employee. The most surprising finding of the paper that sustainability was perceived to be higher in FWAMS (Four Wheeler Automobile sector) as compare to the TWAMS (Two Wheeler Automobile sector). Inadequate knowledge of the employees about the organisation’s collaboration with UN’s Global compact, inability in fighting against consumer’s discrimination, firm’s inability to measure and control the health and safety risks, poor implementation in measuring public’s exposure to toxic products were the important drawbacks reported at TWAMS. This is an outrageous as TWAMS as it is been considered as the more preferable sector by the lower, middle as well as the high class families. The present study gives a light to the prerequisite of appearance of similar manner of research to explore the consumer as behavior toward sustainability in other sectors. One limitation of the study is the use of self amended measures and the coverage of the single sector, which can reduce the generalizability of the findings.

Keywords: environment protection, health and safety, legal compliance, sustainability, user, waste minimization.