From Intent to Impact: a Proactive Event Approach for Amplifying Sustainability Across Time

We extend event system theory (EST) to conceptualize proactive events and examine how event duration, timing, criticality, and disruption are related to two phases of change associated with an organizationally initiated event. Specifically, we explore the impact of a new sustainability monitoring system on energy consumption using longitudinal archival data from 87 manufacturing units of a Fortune 200 multinational firm. We use a variant of mixed-effects discontinuous growth modeling (DGM) to test EST propositions related to initial and longer-term changes associated with implementing the monitoring system. Results indicate that while the new sustainability monitoring system is effective in reducing within-unit energy consumption on average, there are significant differences in change magnitude between units. The magnitude of change during the pre-post phase was related to between-unit differences in event duration, timing, criticality, and disruption. Longer-term change patterns were related to between-unit differences in managerial criticality behaviors. The results empirically validate several of EST’s core propositions and provide an illustration of how DGM can be modified to study events that vary in onset and duration across entities.