Organizational Control, Sustainability ...

To support organizations that struggle with achieving sustainability innovation performance and fear having to trade in their economic innovation success for that, this research investigates the antecedents and consequences of innovation performance considering sustainability related outcomes. Drawing on organizational control theory and multi-respondent field-survey data collected from 114 firms, we identify managerial approaches to orchestrate the complex innovation task that produces sustainability-related outcomes that go beyond isolated and individual managerial practices: managers can facilitate sustainability innovation performance through the sustainability innovation strategy, which embeds output and behavioral formal control by defining goals and determining actions. The effect gets stronger when complemented by a sustainability mindset, which represents the social control used to align organizational values, norms, and behavior. However, the sustainability mindset has no independent effect. Furthermore, we demonstrate that at the innovation portfolio level, sustainability innovation performance and economic innovation performance are positively associated. Thus, there is no goal conflict as occasionally assumed.