Tensions and Personal Responsibilities When Engaging in a Responsible Career: Focus on CSR Managers and Emotions

Scientists keep alarming on the dangerous effect of sustainability challenges, begging decision-makers to engage in ecological transition. Organizations rely on CSR managers to answer the call. This is a task full of paradoxes, not only due to the current hypercompetitive global context, but also because of the difficulty to integrate social and environmental performance to this already paradoxical economic context. In addition, CSR managers also experience conflicting strategies toward CSR that are often instrumental, creating goal conflicts. Finally, CSR managers are also torn by their own and others’ eco-anxiety that they manage at work against the social emotionology. Smith and Lewis’s (Academy of Management Review 36(2): 381–403, 2011) dynamic equilibrium model suggests that emotional equanimity could help calm the anxiety created by all these paradoxical tensions. However, this emotional labor, although might benefit some business leaders, is likely to undermine CSR managers’ motivations. The view that I propose in this chapter is distinct from the dynamic equilibrium model on two points. CSR managers’ emotional complexity and their related anxiety should be acknowledged rather than neutralized, to find alternative paradox resolution that would serve ecological transition rather than business sustainability. So, I build on Smith and Lewis’s work to suggest a model adapted to CSR managers.