Guiding attention for sustainability-oriented innovation: how strategic leaders translate ethical value

Research on sustainable leadership recognizes the importance of leaders' values but says less about how these values gain organizational awareness. Drawing on the attention-based view of the firm, this study examines how strategic leaders translate ethical values into organizational attention and under what conditions this process supports sustainability-oriented innovation. We conduct a comparative multiple-case study of six organizations in France, based on 92 interviews across hierarchical levels, site visits, and documentary evidence. The analysis identifies three configurations. Where formal attentional structures are weak, innovation projects temporarily bridge leaders and employees around shared values. Where leaders provide "air coverage," ethical commitments guide strategic boundaries but remain partly decoupled from operational routines. Where attention is structurally distributed, ethical and business priorities are tightly coupled across organizational levels. These findings show that values do not automatically translate into action: Their organizational effects depend on perceived authenticity, communication channels, and attentional structures. The study extends sustainable leadership research by specifying the conditions of value enactment and extends the attention-based view by revealing the normative foundations of attention distribution.