In the contemporary business world, leaders and managers are increasingly confronted with paradoxical environments in their decision-making process. Specifically, the decision making for corporate sustainability entails conflicting yet interdependent priorities like profitability and sustainability, which are challenging to reconcile and harder to balance. B Corporations (B Corps) exemplify this duality by embedding both commercial viability and stakeholder pluralism at the core of their business model. While prior research has examined the duality of corporate sustainability at the macro level with a focus on institutional logics and strategic positioning, scholarly understanding of the micro-foundations of paradox management in corporate sustainability remains under-developed. Particularly, limited attention has been paid to the tensions at the individual level, how individual managers perceive, interpret, and act upon these competing goals in their decision-making process.
This study investigates how managers in UK certified B Corporations engage in paradoxical sensemaking when confronted with corporate sustainability challenges in decision making. By adopting a qualitative, interpretivist research design, semi-structured interviews are carried out with sustainability managers in UK B Corps to uncover how latent tensions—such as purpose versus profit, innovation versus operational efficiency, and personal values versus organizational expectations—become cognitively salient for organizational actors within their decision-making process. Subsequently, it demonstrates how the paradoxical sensemaking is manifested with the influence of diverse multilevel factors by encapsulating cognitive, emotional, and behavioural processes which underpin the ultimate managerial responses for corporate sustainability in B Corps.
By focusing on micro-level decision making processes, the research extends the comprehension of paradoxical sensemaking and contributes to the development of paradox theory and sensemaking perspective. Practically, it offers insights into how managers can embrace competing demands as drivers of creativity, resilience, and strategic alignment within purpose-driven organizations. The findings have implications for effective leadership, governance, and the cultivation of paradox mindsets in organizations pursuing sustainable transformation.
