Reframing Business Sustainability Decision-Making with Value-Focussed Thinking
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Reframing Business Sustainability Decision‑Making with Value‑Focussed Thinking Julia Benkert1 Received: 30 October 2019 / Accepted: 26 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Per definition business sustainability demands the integration of environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Yet, managerial decision-making involving sustainability objectives is fraught with tension and the way managerial decision-makers frame sustainability issues in their mindset influences how sustainability tensions are managed at the organisational level. In the bid to better understand what types of managerial mindsets, or cognitive frames, foster integrative business sustainability practices that simultaneously advance environmental, social, and economic objectives, extant research has focussed on the underlying logics that drive the acknowledgement of sustainability tensions. However, the existing logics-based constructs do not sufficiently explain this link, and it has been suggested that managers perceive and manage sustainability tensions based on the values that they hold. To clarify the roles of managerial values and logics as antecedents in business sustainability decision-making, we integrate Keeney’s value-focussed thinking approach with managerial and organisational cognition perspectives. Drawing on data from a survey with 169 senior procurement managers in Australia we found three types of cognitive frames which demonstrate that stronger sustainability values are associated with a more holistic perception of sustainability tensions and vice versa. We also found that managers’ cognitive framing of sustainability is strengthened by more holistic organisational cognitive frames and discuss according implications for managerial decision-making in theory and practice. Keywords Business sustainability · Cognitive frames · Decision-making · Value-focussed thinking · Holistic thinking
Introduction Business sustainability concerns the lasting environmental, social, and economic impacts of organisational decision-making. Extant research has established that tensions between social, environmental, and economic objectives are inherent to business sustainability (Haffar and Searcy 2019; Hahn et al. 2015; Van der Byl and Slawinski 2015), and that decision-makers manage tensions by using specific sustainability-related cognitive frames (Epstein et al. 2015; Hahn et al. 2014; Joseph et al. 2020; Sharma and Jaiswal 2018). Research on cognitive frames in business sustainability has mostly focussed on the managerial logics that underpin the acknowledgement and management of sustainability tensions (Berger et al. 2007; Haffar and Searcy * Julia Benkert [email protected] 1
Swinburne Business School, Swinburne University of Technology, John Street, Hawthorn 3122, Australia
2019; Hahn et al. 2014, 2015). However, “individual actors are expected to perceive tensions based on the priorities and values they hold” (Joseph et al. 2020, p. 351, based on Smith and Lewis 2011). In other words, managers will acknowl
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