Collective cognitive frames of UN CEO Water Mandate: Managerial Sensemaking

Abstract

Cognitive construction of competitive environments has long been of interest for researchers seeking to understand the effects of the environment on strategic decision-making. Drawing on the literature on managerial cognition and corporate sustainability, in this article, we develop causal maps of CEOs involved across their core industries through a shared collaborative context—the UN CEO Water Mandate—in an effort to understand how collective strategy frames develop. We study how these frames affect novel strategic environments at firm and industry in the context of sustainability extending the research on managerial sensemaking and collective cognitive frames. Our findings suggest CEOs can and do reach outside of their primary industries through shared contexts reaching evolving patterns and collaboration toward a process of innovation in order to resolve grand challenges at collective level.