Talk, but don’t talk too much: How corporate sustainability communication evokes stepwise organizational change

Abstract

Many companies communicate about their corporate sustainability (CS) activities to demonstrate conformity with stakeholder expectations. This communication is known as CS talk. While the common notion views CS talk as a retrospective description of CS activities, some studies have adopted a formative view of CS talk, acknowledging its potential to trigger CS-related organizational change, i.e., CS walk. Building on this view, we develop a novel conceptual framework describing the link between CS talk and walk. We propose that while CS talk stimulates future CS walk, too much talk can inhibit companies from aligning their words with actions, leading to an inverted U-shaped relationship between CS talk and walk. Moreover, we suggest that the extent to which external stakeholders monitor a company amplifies the inverted U-shape effect. Beyond that, we assert that the performative impact of CS talk on walk gradually unfolds within companies by initially triggering symbolic CS walk, which subsequently translates into substantive CS walk. To test our theorizing, we created a text-based measure for CS talk and matched it with secondary data, assembling a sample of 820 US companies listed in the S&P 1,500 over 15 years. The results of our analysis support our theorizing and contribute to research at the intersection of CS-related communication and organizational change, providing insights into the shape of the performative effect of CS talk and the organizational change process it initiates.