Not My Business: How Individuals’ Role Identities Shape Sensegiving During Corporate Sustainability Initiatives

Abstract

Managing organizational change toward corporate sustainability requires leaders to engage in sensegiving activities to alter organizational members’ interpretation of issues within and outside the organization. However, we still lack detailed insights into how efforts aimed at changing members’ cognitive frames through sensegiving are shaped by differences in members’ roles and role identities. To address this shortcoming, we draw on an 18-month longitudinal case study of a sustainability initiative within a medium-sized firm. We show that role identities shape the effectiveness of sensegiving, since they can lead individuals to dodge, delete, or disregard frame-challenging information. At the same time, persistent differences in frames across individuals within the organization may lead organizational members to constrain, criticize, or counteract others’ role adjustment. By developing a framework that shows how interactions between sensegiving, role identities, and cognitive frames shape organizational change, our work contributes to the literature on corporate sustainability, sensemaking/sensegiving, and role identities.