Development of the company's behaviour model in environmental corporate social responsibility situations

Introduction: The role of businesses in creating and solving environmental crises is significant. Today, company managers are so crushed under the wheel of capitalism that they don't have a chance to think about the long-term effects of their behaviour. The purpose of this article is to examine how companies behave with the environment, with a pluralistic approach in behavioural strategy. Behavioural strategy is a new approach in strategic management that, by using social psychology knowledge, explains how companies behave and is divided into three schools: reductionism, contextualism, and pluralism. In pluralistic approach, by comparing different narratives of stakeholders, organization internal and external conflicts become clear and the opportunities for improving the behaviour of the firm with the environment can be provided.
Research method: The foundations of epistemology in the school of pluralism in behavioural strategy are based on the philosophy of nominalism, pragmatism and evolutionary knowledge. This research is qualitative and has been carried out using systematic grounded theory method. Since this research does not seek to create meaning, but the goal is to get closer to the reality by putting together the diverse narratives of the stakeholders, the method of systematic grounded theory by providing a tool to discover the relationship of the existing facts helps better. The data has been extracted through semi-structured interviews with fourteen various stakeholders, including environmental experts, company managers, governmental officers in charge of the environment, environmental journalists and non-governmental organization activists. The obtained data were analysed through text analysis methods and open, axial and selective coding procedures were implemented. The company's behaviour model was developed in these decision-making situations about the environment. The agreement of two coder's method was used to measure validity and the confirmability method of Lincoln and Guba was used to measure reliability.
Findings: In the open coding stage, 173 codes were identified, which were divided into ten main categories in the axial coding stage. Decision-making regarding the situation management of the company's behaviour with the environment was identified as the central phenomenon of the research. Certain characteristics of the phenomenon include being non-repetitive, satisfying, and having uncertain results. There are other characteristics that exist in different types of phenomena, which include the degree of effect on the environment, the degree of effect on business, the degree of dissatisfaction of other stakeholders, the degree of transparency of the issue and the number of engaged stakeholders. These attributes in each example of the phenomenon can have a value from very low to very high in the dimensions that were said. Pressure from external stakeholders, business requirements and personal motivation of managers were identified as the causal conditions of the phenomenon. The dimensions of the phenomenon include the effect of the decision on the business, the effect of decision on the environment, the number of stakeholders and the pressure of the stakeholders. The decision maker chooses among the seven behaviours including Postponing decision making, concealment and continuation of previous behaviour, weakening the signs of the problem, stopping the destructive activities, calculating the business effects on environment, compensation of damages and correcting the process to preserve the environment. The mediating factors include the conditions of the company, the legal and political context, and the cultural factors of the society, which influence how managers make decisions. Every behaviour will have consequences on the economic status of the company, the company's brand and the company's executive processes on the one hand and consequences for the company's industry, the environment and local people on the other hand.
Conclusion: What distinguishes this research from similar researches in the field of relationship between organization and environment is the adoption of pluralistic approach in behavioural strategy. By putting together the different narratives of the stakeholders, it was concluded that due to the many economic concerns, the environmental concerns have been marginalized. There is not enough trust between the stakeholders and there is a lack of a constructive dialogue space to save the environment. Considering that the environment is a public good, the health of the agency mechanism in protecting the environment is very important, and the freedom of the media, the health of the judicial system, and the lack of confusion between private and state ownership can have a significant effect on improving this issue. According to the limitations of this research, it is suggested that the influence of the agency mechanism on the how managers select among the identified behaviours be investigated more closely. Also, from a practical point of view, optimizing the distribution of human and financial resources of environmental rulers, on the three issues of monitoring, demanding and developing win-win solutions between stakeholders can speed up the cycle of improving the behaviour of companies with the environment.