This paper reconceptualizes sustainability leadership as a process of decision-making under value pluralism, where leaders must navigate persistent trade-offs among legitimate but incommensurable economic, social and environmental values. It aims to advance sustainability leadership theory by demonstrating how leaders recognize, interpret and respond to conflicting demands.
A conceptual framework is created that identifies three trade-off domains, i.e. internal, external and temporal, and proposes four typical decision-making strategies, i.e. integrative, compromise, sacrificial and symbolic. To demonstrate and improve the theory, a vignette-based experiment with 412 managers manipulated regulatory enforcement, stakeholder pressure and organizational slack to see how these factors influence strategic decision-making.
The results demonstrate that strong enforcement increased sacrificial decisions, organizational slack enabled integrative solutions and stakeholder pressure reduced symbolic responses. Integrative and sacrificial strategies were consistently judged as more legitimate and beneficial for long-term reputation and performance than compromise or symbolic approaches. These findings provide behavioral evidence that leadership decisions in sustainability are contingent upon institutional, organizational and individual contexts.
By embedding leadership within the dynamics of decision-making under value conflict, this paper shifts the focus from harmonization to trade-offs. It specifies multilevel mechanisms and boundary conditions that shape the effectiveness of different decision strategies, offering a more realistic, context-sensitive and pluralistic account of sustainability leadership. This contribution enriches decision-making theory in management by explaining how leaders handle complex, ambiguous and morally significant choices in sustainability contexts.
