Motivations Underlying Large Corporate Sustainability Programs: An Analysis of Interviews with Corporate Sustainability Managers

Corporate sustainability programs at large companies are driven by multiple simultaneous motivations, yet most theoretical accounts treat motivation as reducible to a single framework. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with senior sustainability managers at Fortune 200 companies. The most commonly named motivations among these 30 interviews were risk management and business logic (27), stakeholder and investor pressure (22), intrinsic ethical conviction (13), and regulatory compliance (12). A three-category motivational model emerged—externally-driven (17), values-integrated (10), and values-driven (3)—organized around whether sustainability commitment originates in external pressure, internal conviction, or both. The values-integrated category—in which both external pressure and genuine internal conviction are simultaneously present—is theoretically significant, as it describes a motivational profile that neither a pure greenwashing account nor a pure idealism account would predict. Nearly all participants (29) framed sustainability as a company-wide mode of operating rather than a discrete program, and 26 viewed the senior sustainability role as effectively permanent. The findings suggest that single-theory analyses of sustainability motivation mischaracterize a multi-driver reality, and that direct interview methods are better positioned than disclosure-based research to surface the stated values component of corporate motivation, though stated values may not determine resource allocation.