Translating Sustainability Vision into Action: Insights from Sustainability Managers

Abstract

With a growing emphasis on corporate sustainability, the role of sustainability managers has expanded beyond compliance and reporting towards guiding organizations in translating sustainability visions into concrete action. Acknowledging this shift, existing research calls for a deeper understanding of the processes through which sustainability visions become embedded in practice. This qualitative study addresses the empirical gap by exploring how sustainability managers enact their role as translators of vision within organizational contexts. 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with sustainability managers across five different industries. Our study identifies three interconnected dimensions through which sustainability managers realize organizational vision; they distribute responsibility between organizational levels, engage in contextual and recipient-oriented communication and drive materialization. Through continuous sensegiving, sustainability managers navigate organizational ambiguity by fostering engagement and co-constructed understanding. This study contributes to the field of management studies by emphasizing the relational, iterative and co-constructed process of translating sustainability visions into action, while emphasizing the influence of trust, involvement and adaptive communication in shaping sustainable vision implementation.