The Impact of Cultural Issues and Interpersonal Behavior on Sustainable Excellence and Competitiveness: An Analysis of the Italian Context

The scope of this paper is to explore how cultural factors and behavioral preferences impact on organizational aspects facilitating or obstructing the ability of an organization to implement and succeed in its efforts towards sustainability, and how to take action on cultural factors in order to make the way to sustainability possible.

The paper first explores the need of management models for corporate sustainability, proposing the integration of sustainability within a preexisting business excellence model (i.e. EFQM Excellence Model), in order to achieve what is here defined as sustainable excellence. The cultural advantages and the cultural obstacles on both business excellence and corporate sustainability will be explored, together with the ways through which the cultural obstacles can be faced and overtaken through cultural changes at corporate, sector o nationwide level. An example of this will be found in the Italian context.