Sustainable value creation in multinational enterprises: The role of corporate governance actors

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are increasingly expected to make their global operations sustainable, while overcoming important obstacles in a rugged global landscape. In this perspective article, we argue that a focus on their corporate governance (CG) actors – i.e., owners, directors, and executives – is key for understanding the premises of MNEs’ sustainable value creation. We develop an actor-centered perspective on MNEs whereby factors inherent to and surrounding CG actors – e.g., their cognition, personality, and values, as well as their interactions and governance – will determine the pervasiveness of their bounded rationality and bounded reliability, thus influencing whether, how, and under what conditions these key actors will contribute through their decisions to sustainable value creation. Our perspective advances nascent actor-centered research on MNEs’ non-market strategies, including corporate social responsibility and sustainability. Exploring the underlying mechanisms at the source of individual-level variation (next to firm-, industry-, and country-level variation) related to sustainable value creation may support theory development that can ultimately break new ground in explaining the strategic behavior and sustainable performance of MNEs. We formulate future research suggestions toward that end.