Hållbar organisationsförändring inom detaljhandeln : En explorativ studie i syfte att undersöka relationen mellan ledarskap och intern kommunikation

In a society where the sustainability trend is growing and becoming increasingly important, companies are expected to make clearer commitments to sustainability where consumers are increasingly demanding a change when it comes to among other things, production and social responsibility. In retail, there is a clear wave of sustainability due to increased knowledge and that consumers now do more conscious choices. In turn, this result in an increased pressure on companies as a whole but also on well-functioning leadership and internal communication at store level. At the same time, there is little research on the relationship between leadership and internal communication and the importance of employees during a sustainable organizational change. The overall purpose of the study is to investigate the relationship between leadership and internal communication during a sustainable change. Further, the study intends to further answer two research questions:- How do leaders in retail work with internal communication to implement a sustainable organizational change?- How do store managers and employees experience internal communication and leadership during a sustainable organizational change? A delimitation has been made where the authors have chosen the retail company Clas Ohlson where the company’s ambitions for sustainability are in line with the government’s environmental goals until 2045, to be climate neutral. Furthermore, two stores have been selected to conduct the study. The qualitative study is based on an inductive approach with an exploratory approach, this entails a deeper analysis of the case study that is carried out. Nine respondents with three different positions within the company participated in semi-structured interviews and that additional data was collected from public published organizational document. A thematic analysis was conducted to encode the collected data where the authors found three primary factors that affect the relationship between leadership and internal communication during the sustainable organizational change: commitment, overflow of information and lack of time. The study finds that it is the commitment of the leaders through offering employee’s information and knowledge that can lead to a positive impact in the sustainable change. Furthermore, both the store manager and employees experience how communication has a negative effect due to the overflow of information that leads to employees having difficulty searching for information and the lack of time is often mentioned as a contributing factor. This leads us to the general conclusion that shows that it is not the leadership at a store level that affect, rather shortcomings in the communication which in turn, affects the implementation of the sustainable organizational change