Cognitive Orientation and Sustainability Decisions in Operations: An Experimental Study

ABSTRACT Sustainability in operations presents a complex challenge, requiring managers to navigate tradeoffs among economic outcomes, environmental responsibility, and societal impact. While firms are under increasing pressure to adopt sustainability initiatives, operations managers, who play a key role in sustainability, may be inclined to prioritize economic considerations. Hence, understanding how to effectively nudge managers toward supporting sustainability initiatives is an important concern for organizations. In this paper, we use construal level theory to explore the cognitive orientation of operations managers (abstract or concrete) as a mechanism that shapes their willingness to engage in sustainability initiatives. Across a series of vignette‐based experiments, we examine how abstract versus concrete thinking influences managers' support for sustainability, drawing on both naturally occurring and experimentally induced variations in cognitive orientation. Additionally, we employ general and context‐specific manipulations to establish causality, offering a practical nudge that organizations can operationalize in business contexts. We also study whether the observed effects of cognitive orientation persist across different types of sustainability trade‐offs. Together, our findings suggest that how managers think fundamentally shapes sustainability‐related decisions, and decision‐makers with an abstract mindset, which emphasizes the “why” of actions, are more likely to support sustainability initiatives compared to those with concrete orientations, who are focused on “how” decisions are implemented. Our findings suggest organizations can strategically influence operations managers' support for sustainability initiatives by fostering abstract thinking through training programs, framing and scenarios, and designing incentive structures to align operations management practices with sustainability objectives.