Sustainability Managers’ job crafting practices: Forging collective paths in an isolated land

In a world where companies are increasingly under scrutiny in terms of sustainability, a growing number of companies tend to designate a Sustainability Manager to take charge of these corporate social responsibility and sustainability matters. The literature that has focused on the experience of Sustainability Managers is mainly concerned with highlighting the tensions that exist between working towards sustainability and business logic, while the way in which they take ownership of and construct their role remains under-explored. Furthermore, Sustainability Managers are often labelled as change agents by default... This exploratory research investigates how recently appointed Sustainability Managers experience their role and craft their job to become change agents in their organization. The data collected via semi-structured interviews was analyzed in the light of Wrzesniewski and Dutton's (2001) reading grid on job crafting, which suggests differentiating between task, relationship and cognitive job crafting.
The results show that the main result of the job crafting practices of the newly appointed Sustainability Managers is to make their role more collective, as opposed to a formally relatively solitary job. We argue that Sustainability Managers actively work to shape their role, mainly towards greater collectivity, and that this work is what enables them to attempt to become change agents.