Sustainability logic and goals in operations: An experimental study

Abstract

The tensions among the three pillars of sustainability – economic, environmental, and social – pose significant challenges for organizational decision making. We examine how goal setting, goal difficulty, goal specificity, and organizational sustainability logic shape operations decisions and sustainability outcomes amid these trade-offs, using vignette-based experiments. We observe that a sustainability logic that emphasizes all dimensions of sustainability may not, on its own, improve environmental outcomes, suggesting its impact might be strengthened if coupled with concrete, actionable levers – such as goal setting – that operationalize and signal sustainability commitments within decision making processes. Setting environmental performance goals alongside traditional financial objectives emerges as a key lever in our study for promoting pro-environmental behavior, with the characteristics of these goals and their alignment with the organization’s dominant sustainability logic playing a critical role. Our findings highlight the need to strategically configure goal mechanisms to navigate sustainability tensions effectively and offer practical guidance for embedding sustainability into operations decisions.