Penalty Zones and International Sustainability Standards

Description

Increasingly, sustainability standards are recognized as important tools for helping companies navigate the complex sustainability landscape. These standards help companies tackle their social and environmental challenges and serve as credible signals to stakeholders that they are doing the right thing, thus creating potential opportunities for the market to reward these companies.  

But what really happens when companies adopt multiple standards? Do companies’ sustainability and market performance continue to improve? Not necessarily. Nicole Darnall, Kostas Iatridis, Effie Kesidou, and Annie Snelson-Powell‘s research shows that adopting multiple sustainability standards becomes “too-much-of-a-good-thing.”