A tool to measure organizational sustainability strength

Last year`s developments in the economies of Europe, US and other countries have awakened us for the challenges of sustainability of the economies, countries and economic organizations as well. In this context, many companies all over the world revealed disability to deal with this present environment by failing to disclose proper strategic decisions in a significant number of cases, unbalanced management practices and the general failure to make a good use of their resources efficiently and effectively in the situation of volatile markets, in order to guarantee its consolidation and stable functioning of businesses and society. These facts had also revealed that financial and economic attitude implemented by some companies, which are focused on short-term earnings, was surpassing a humanist and social vision of businesses and society and revealing a lack of ethic and corporate responsibility in transactions development and in the relations with stakeholders, incompliance with legal obligations, sometimes the manipulation of financial and other corporate data in order to boost a company`s valuation. Beyond several factors that could be considered relevant in the framework of sustainability and according to the “DPODE Model for Organizational Sustainability” (2010), there are some pillars (dimensions) that seem to be of major importance and under which businesses management needs to develop abilities to ensure the sustainability of their organizations. After a primary application of the model to two major Portuguese organizations to test it, the authors are trying to improve it by disclosing a set of organizational competences and dimensions to be analyzed at different levels of organizations in terms of their objectivity and scope of information, regarding each one of the five pillars of the model (Direction, Posture, Organization, Behavior and Evaluation). In this sense, with the adoption of focus group research technic the authors united some academic researchers and managers to analyze and develop each pillar of the proposed model. The authors are developing a study with the support of the Portuguese Construction Technological Platform regarding the main contractors of the sector in Portugal, aiming to reveal the sustainable strength indexes of each one and to disclose the pattern of sustainability robustness of this group of companies. This paper includes a literature review on several aspects of the organizational sustainability and a review about the model, coupled with the proposal of a mathematical application in order to measure an organization`s sustainability strength