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Organizational Behavior.

This case is suitable to be used in advanced undergraduate and MBA/MSc level.

This case highlights the problems and prospects of World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-Turkey’s Green Office program initiative. Green Office is an environmental management system developed by WWF-Finland 15 years ago and currently operates in China, Latvia, Pakistan, and Turkey in more than 200 organizations. The objectives of the program are to reduce the ecological footprint of the offices, decrease the negative impact of everyday operations at work, motivate and educate the employees to behave environmentally friendly, increase environmental awareness, reduce emissions, and save energy. WWF-Turkey runs the program since 2011, and it aims to influence and inspire people and businesses to address threats to nature and protect it for the sake of present and future generations. To be considered as a Green Office, an organization needs to comply with three main criteria: (1) consumption of natural resources (i.e., heating–cooling, office stationery, transportation, electricity, water, paper, and food consumption), (2) activities (i.e., purchase, cafeteria, cleaning services, waste management, building maintenance), and (3) increase in employees’ awareness. Accordingly, Green Office helps to determine concrete goals by systematically assessing the office resources and create their environmental management system. This case discusses the core essence of the Green Office program, the steps followed in implementing the program, as well as its benefits and challenges of being a Green Office.

The objective of this case is:

• to illustrate WWF-Turkey’s Green Office program initiative and

• to make students understand how a non-governmental organization (NGO) can foster green organizational behavior and embrace socially responsible business practices.

to illustrate WWF-Turkey’s Green Office program initiative and

to make students understand how a non-governmental organization (NGO) can foster green organizational behavior and embrace socially responsible business practices.

Sustainable features are gradually becoming important considerations by commercial real estate users. This is because of their considered impact in reducing operating costs and potential at reducing the negative impacts of buildings on human health and the natural environment. This chapter sought to examine the demands for sustainable features by users of commercial real estate like offices in Lagos State, Nigeria. It also evaluated the factors influencing demand for them to achieve value for money and enhance real estate investment decisions. The quantitative research methodology was adopted, and primary data were collected via questionnaires distributed to 134 purposively selected estate surveying firms in the study area. Ninety-five representing (70.9%) were returned and found useable and were analysed with the aid of descriptive statistics of percentages, mean and relative willingness index. The study found that power/energy-saving features are in high demand as alternatives to the epileptic nature of power supply in the country. The study recommended the need for the government to encourage the adoption and incorporation of locally made sustainable features in commercial real estate and to subsidise them for use in the Lagos commercial real estate market. Thus, it is concluded that with the right environment created by policy makers, sustainable features in buildings have huge potentials to contribute to prevent environmental problems in an emerging commercial real estate market like Nigeria.

This chapter focuses on the physical work environment, in particular, the possibilities and limitations of biophilic design in hotel office space. Biophilic design has already gained attention in directly influencing the guest experience, but little focus has been given to workspace. Traditionally, the hospitality industry places employees' office spaces in parts of the hotel not appropriate as guest space due to lack of daylight and windows. Many studies have shown that improving the workplace with nature-based features can play a role in increasing employee well-being. Data collected from employees with both extensive managerial and back-of-house hotel experience established that employees would welcome the opportunity to work in such an environment and currently find back-of-house design basic and lacking any aesthetically pleasing elements. An understanding of the obstacles in initiating such changes was shown as well as employee initiatives to improve work spaces. This initial exploratory study concludes that the needs of employees in terms of comfort, wellbeing, motivation and work satisfaction are often overlooked when considering back-of-house spaces. There is a general understanding and expectation that management needs to develop awareness and practical initiatives to address the deficits of the physical work environment. Biophilic design can be influential in promoting a calming and restorative environment at the workplace and thus positively impacting employee motivation and performance.

This case highlights the journey of the Capital University of Science and Technology (CUST) to adhere to the green organization initiatives. In 2016, the government of Pakistan announced its adherence to the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs) 2030 and asked the regulatory bodies to improvize accordingly. Following this announcement, the Higher Education Commission (HEC), the main regulatory body in Pakistan, instructed all universities to fulfill their responsibility toward environment and align themselves with UN-SDGs 2030. As a response to this call, in 2017, CUST decided to shift toward sustainability by making changes in its policies and strategic planning. The emphasis was vital to attract Gen Z, gain international recognition, and align with the Pakistan regulatory body of (HEC). In doing so, the management decided that the campus should go green. The installation of solar panels on campus was one such green initiative through which the university was able to produce 3,650 units per day. After a long and decisive struggle, the university has achieved eighth position in Universitas Indonesia-GreenMetric World Ranking 2020 and making the regulatory authority happier.

We study ceremonial adoption of voluntary standards, where participants adopt the standard in principle but do not change their practices. Ceremonial adoption can benefit individual participants, who may be able to reap the benefits of association with the standard at lower cost, but it can be problematic for overall levels of adoption. We conceive of ceremonial adoption as an interaction between strategic incentives of participants and social ties to their audiences, such that not all participants are likely to ceremonially adopt. Our setting is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for sustainable construction. We study the conditions under which projects register for LEED certification, allowing them to claim affiliation with LEED, but then do not actually finish certification. While our data are correlational in nature, our results suggest that studying the competition for audience members (in our case, occupants) can provide greater understanding of certification behavior as well as overall levels of adoption. Our findings have implications for organizations that design and maintain voluntary standards and for organization theorists who wish to understand field-level change. Thus, we provide more evidence that strategy and organizational theory interact in important and often unexamined ways.

In recent years, sustainability considerations in the real estate sector have moved from being a niche market phenomenon to a mainstream trend. The movement has been accompanied by a shift in the industry’s perception of sustainable buildings. Traditional cost-saving goals are now complemented by a growing interest in the potential for sustainable buildings to tackle broader economic and social sustainability challenges as well as issues related to health and well-being. The real estate industry is increasingly expected to adapt its strategies to incorporate new and more stringent environmental and urban development requirements, to cater to shifting demographics, and to utilize new advancements in construction processes and materials. This chapter explores recent research on sustainable real estate and highlights some of the newest trends in the market. The chapter then examines how policy and technological advancements can enable real estate developers to tackle environmental, social, and economic sustainability challenges. This will be exemplified through a focus on carbon taxation and timber construction. Based on these case studies, the chapter illustrates how today’s sustainable real estate sector – marked by its move beyond a focus on cost savings – requires for building practices to be strongly rooted in global, sustainable development policies.