Getting to the Heart of Corporate Sustainability: The Role of Managerial Values and Motivation in the Mongolian Mining Industry

Abstract

Corporate sustainability is often instantiated within a firm on a continuum, ranging from decoupling behaviors to substantive sustainability actions. Prior research has considered organizational and institutional predictors of this phenomenon, but to date, the role of micro-level mechanisms has been largely overlooked. Yet, individual value orientation and motivation are key indicators of pro-environmental behavior. We consider how values drive a manager’s end goals, and influence the firm’s environmental strategy. We also explore how the manager’s cognitive motivation – specifically promotion and prevention regulatory focus – moderates these effects. We test our model using quantitative survey with executives in the Mongolian mining industry. While our findings show a significant effect between altruistic value orientation and environmental strategy, there is a lack of direct effects by egoistic and biospheric value orientations. Instead, a manager’s regulatory focus is a boundary condition that affects how egoistic and biospheric values are expressed in corporate environmental behavior.