The micro-foundations of ambidexterity for corporate social performance: A study on sustainability managers’ response to conflicting goals
通过对41位可持续发展管理者及其利益相关者的访谈，研究了管理者如何通过内外、长短期的中介行为应对可持续性与盈利性等冲突目标，并受个人价值观、多学科知识及组织制度的影响。
Studies on corporate social performance advocate that interrelated yet conflicting goals, such as sustainability and profitability, give rise to specific dynamics and inherent tensions, and call for more research to investigate how the duality of goals is managed by specific individuals in organizations. Through a micro-foundational view of ambidexterity for corporate social performance, and by relying on a qualitative data analysis of 41 interviews with sustainability managers and their immediate stakeholders, both internal and external to their organization boundaries, we developed a multilevel model of sustainability managers' responses to conflicting goals. We discovered how sustainability managers enacted internal and external, long term and short term brokering behaviors, enabled by their individual values, multidisciplinary knowledge, and relational abilities and skills, although constrained by their organizational and institutional contexts. By taking into account simultaneously contextual forces and individual cognitive characteristics, we thus advance our understanding of sustainability managers’ behaviors towards ambidexterity for corporate social responsibility and of microfoundations for ambidexterity.