While business responses to climate change have been well researched on the organizational and institutional levels, the corporate strategic behavior on the microlevelthat ranges from proactivity to climate inaction-remain under-researched. This article explores the individual determinants that affect the sensemaking phases, scanning, interpretation, and action, concerning the installation of on-site renewable energy technologies. We investigate the extent to which managerial sensemaking is affected by different perceptions, motives, and skills in relation to renewable energy. By doing so, we uncover the individual determinants that affect decisions to either accept or reject the installation of renewable energy technologies. We contribute to the literature on business responses to climate change by deriving several key individual determinants on the microlevel, including technological expertise, sustainability orientation, time perspective, and economic growth attitude, which affect managers' sensemaking. Thus, we offer a framework to illustrate how these individual characteristics can lead either to proactive business responses or conversely to climate inaction.

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We investigate the role external change agents (e.g., consultants), play in stimulating corporate sustainability investments. Using data on more than 5,300 energy efficiency investment decisions by 462 firms, we find that firms that draw more strongly on external change agents seize significantly more sustainable investment opportunities. We show that external change agents are more effective in stimulating investments if they broadly search for investment opportunities and are more strongly involved in the implementation of change initiatives. Moreover, surprisingly, we do not find that using internal change agents in parallel with external agents enhances the effectiveness of external change agents. Our findings have important implications for the literature on corporate sustainability as they point to external change agents as an important means of steering firms onto more sustainable pathways. Additionally, we shed light on the conditions under which external change agents can be used to most effectively overcome organizational path dependencies.

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Managing organizational change toward corporate sustainability requires leaders to engage in sensegiving activities to alter organizational members’ interpretation of issues within and outside the organization. However, we still lack detailed insights into how efforts aimed at changing members’ cognitive frames through sensegiving are shaped by differences in members’ roles and role identities. To address this shortcoming, we draw on an 18-month longitudinal case study of a sustainability initiative within a medium-sized firm. We show that role identities shape the effectiveness of sensegiving, since they can lead individuals to dodge, delete, or disregard frame-challenging information. At the same time, persistent differences in frames across individuals within the organization may lead organizational members to constrain, criticize, or counteract others’ role adjustment. By developing a framework that shows how interactions between sensegiving, role identities, and cognitive frames shape organizational change, our work contributes to the literature on corporate sustainability, sensemaking/sensegiving, and role identities.