Original scientific paper

The impact of employees’ personal values on their attitudes toward sustainable development: Cases of Slovenia and Romania

Carmen Elena Cirnu ; National Institute for Research & Development in Informatics ICI Bucharest
Boštjan Kuralt ; University of Maribor, Faculty of Economics and Business

Abstract

The main purpose of this contribution is to examine the impact of employees’ personal values on their attitudes toward economic, environmental, and social aspects of sustainable development. The proposed research agenda upgrades in the literature prevalent partial discussions about the influence of personal values on each dimension of the “triple bottom line,” since it considers sustainability as one entity of the three underlying aspects. Furthermore, relations between aspects of sustainable development are empirically examined, not previously done in literature. These findings reveal that personal values play an important role in employees’ perception of different aspects of sustainability. Slovenian employees understand sustainability as an entity of three aspects: economic, environmental, and societal, while results for the Romanian sample indicate that sustainability comprises primarily environmental and societal dimensions. Findings also suggest that the content of the sustainability concept in countries with different cultural backgrounds is understood differently. The results are reported for two culturally different EU member states—namely, Slovenia and Romania.

Keywords

attitudes; cultural differences; employees; personal values; sustainable development; Romania; Slovenia

Hrčak ID:

112635

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/112635

Publication date:

16.12.2013.

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