Belief Traps Hinder Small Business Climate Action

Description

In the second presentation, Lees and colleagues present data from a large (minimum N = 2970), international registered report survey of small-to-medium business owners across Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom, and the United States. The survey examines owners' own normative beliefs regarding organizational sustainability, their perceptions of other SME owners’ normative sustainability beliefs, and the number of sustainability policies currently in place at the SME.

They hypothesize that SME owners will display pluralistic ignorance in the form of significantly underestimating the true extent to which other SME owners believe sustainability is normatively important, and that the magnitude of an
owner’s underestimation of others’ true preferences will predict fewer sustainability policies currently in place in their organization. Moreover, this work examines nine theoretically relevant micro- and macro-level moderators of this hypothesized pluralistic ignorance and its relationship with existing policies within the SME.

Period	28 Jul 2025
Event title	85th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management
Event type	Conference
Location	Copenhagen, DenmarkShow on map