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

41 Pages Posted: 20 May 2016

See all articles by Eunice Ng

Eunice Ng

Nanyang Technological University

Judith Walls

Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

Ganchimeg Wingard

Denver Zoological Foundation

Date Written: May 2016

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.

Keywords: corporate environmental sustainability, managers, decoupling, values, motivation, self-regulatory focus

Suggested Citation

Ng, Eunice and Walls, Judith and Wingard, Ganchimeg, Getting to the Heart of Corporate Sustainability: The Role of Managerial Values and Motivation in the Mongolian Mining Industry (May 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781343 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2781343

Eunice Ng (Contact Author)

Nanyang Technological University ( email )

Singapore

Judith Walls

Nanyang Technological University (NTU) ( email )

S3 B2-A28 Nanyang Avenue
Singapore, 639798
Singapore

Ganchimeg Wingard

Denver Zoological Foundation ( email )

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