Environmental sustainability decision‐making: clearing a path to change

If people expect organizations to care for the natural environment, leaders in public affairs need to better understand how and why firms move to engage in sustainable enterprise. We broach this issue as an ethical challenge and present a theoretical framework to explain the path to environmental sustainability decision-making (ESDM). Standard ethics and economic decision-making models inform our work, yet we also incorporate a non-rational element, allowing us to draw insight from psychology and organizational behavior. This view reflects the holistic nature of ESDM, an effort driven by both conscious and non-conscious elements. Our work edifies sustainable development theory by presenting ESDM in the context of collective moral emotions, which serve as underlying motivators of ideas and feelings. We add granularity to prior models, describing how this affective force can influence an organization's progression along the ESDM path. In moving to achieve sustainability goals that affect stakeholders, we explain how negative sentiments may impose drag and how positive sentiments may compel lift toward environmental sustainability action. These paths can contribute to worthwhile, yet different, forms of change. Awareness of the ESDM framework will help public affairs establish more congruent communication, processes, and policies, working to reduce uncertainty and encouraging the need for more explicit internal self-regulation. By synthesizing concepts, we create a coherent and useful picture, one that can give public affairs access to these ideas and help them find useful ways to apply them. Implications suggest leveraging strengths from affective forces may be a useful means to encourage actions that protect the natural environment. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.