Development of a circular organizational culture for a product-service system business model

Abstract

Circular Economy (CE) represents a new emerging concept and a new business model trend, with the goal of transforming the current economic model to a more resilient one. Product-Service System (PSS) is the most valuable and disruptive innovation in business model once it enables the dematerialization and change the ownership. A successful transition to CE requires changes in the way companies understand and do business. Organizations that are trying to survive in this transition, through PSS implementation need to adapt their culture and leadership. The alignment of organizational culture is essential so that the organizations can reach long-term and resilient results. Therefore, organizational culture have an important role in CE transition, because to implement any Circular Business Models (CBM) it is required collaboration and changes in structure, resources, values, behaviors and beliefs. However, themes related to change management, like organizational culture, are not studied in the context of PSS implementation. For this reason, the central purpose of this work is the transformation of the organizational culture elements to facilitate the implementation of the Product-Service System (PSS), to foster CE. To reach this purpose we will carry out a systematic literature review to identify the relation among CE, PSS and Organizational Culture, a survey to obtain the elements that will compose the circular organizational culture building blocks and a case study to confirm these building blocks. With this research, we seek to provide academic and practical contributions. (AU)