CEO Strategy Frames in Designing Corporate Sustainability : Navigation of Paradoxical Processes

Adopting corporate sustainability requires organizational change and commitment by the top managers inside a firm. In particular, this paper explores CEO strategy frames as a driver of corporate sustainability at the organization level. Certain strategy frames of the CEO - flexibility, centrality, and complexity - allow for corporate sustainability to be diffused inside the organization through navigating paradoxical processes such as exploration vs. exploitation, shareholder vs. stakeholder engagement, and dominant vs. multi-faceted goal setting. I propose that the strategy frame characteristics facilitate and inhibit the balancing of these paradoxical processes, such that it impacts the achievement of organization-level corporate sustainability. These multi-level processes are articulated theoretically to build a CEO-driven model of corporate sustainability.