Poster by Sabrina Schopf¹, Barbara Stiglbauer²
¹ Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria ² Johannes Kepler University, Austria
TIME: Thursday, 16 July, 12:00 – 13:15
Location: Break Room
Session: Poster Session
Abstract
Employees in sustainability-challenged industries often find themselves caught between personal environmental values and organizational practices. While prior research has highlighted tensions, less attention has been paid to the psychological processes through which employees make sense of these conflicts under constrained organizational conditions. Against a theoretical background of moral disengagement and cognitive dissonance, this study examines how employees in the plastics industry experience and interpret sustainability-related value–action conflicts in their work. The plastics industry provides a context in which sustainability tensions are particularly pronounced, as employees work in organizations closely connected to broader environmental challenges and often experience limited individual agency. The study draws on 12 semi-structured interviews with employees in plastics manufacturing and processing organizations and applies thematic analysis to explore how sustainability-related practices are explained, justified, and emotionally managed in everyday work. Preliminary findings indicate that employees draw on different strategies to distance themselves from the environmental implications of their work, including shifting responsibility, reframing environmental harm, or pointing to technological progress and external constraints. At the same time, the interviews reveal recurring experiences of cognitive dissonance, expressed through ambivalence and ongoing negotiation between personal environmental values and professional roles. Instead of being tied to isolated sustainability decisions, these strategies and tensions are embedded in everyday work routines, which are shaped by limited individual agency. In this context, moral disengagement does not resolve sustainability conflicts but makes them more manageable in everyday organizational life, while at the same time allowing environmentally harmful practices to persist. By offering a qualitative, subject-centered perspective on moral disengagement in sustainability-challenged industry contexts, this study contributes to work and organizational psychology by highlighting how psychological processes can both help individuals cope with sustainability conflicts and sustain problematic organizational practices.