Corporate sustainability: paradoxical cognitive framing of mining sustainability tensions and environmental outcome

Abstract

Corporate sustainability (CS) has challenged the traditional approach to measuring business success and introduced a broader definition of success that encompasses integrated sustainability across social, environmental, and economic domains. However, this has not been without tensions, such as conflict between short-term profit generation and investment into long-term sustainability. The paradoxical cognitive frame has been proposed as a foundation for navigating these tensions fairly, without prioritising one element of sustainability over the other. The majority of the literature focuses on Europe and North America and has taken a qualitative approach to analyse the nature of these tensions and the effect of a paradoxical cognitive frame on the relationship between perceived experience of sustainability tensions and sustainability outcomes. Furthermore, the antecedents of paradoxical cognitive framing, such as management roles and situational ability training, have received little research attention. As such, the current research study examined how paradoxical cognitive framing modulates the relationship between perceived experience of sustainability tensions (PEST) (efficiency versus resilience) and environmental sustainability outcome (ESO). It also investigated the influence of strategic role and training variation on paradoxical cognitive frame. The study was a cross-sectional, quantitative study of a sample of 123 management team members, which included executives, middle, and senior management, within the South African mining industry. Structural equations and correlation analyses were applied to analyse the data. The study results diagnosed a negative relationship between PEST and ESO. The influence of paradoxical cognitive frame between the PEST and ESO was not detected and the influence of training variation on paradoxical cognitive frame was also not proven to exist. However, the study showed a partial influence of the senior management role on the paradoxical cognitive frame.