This article embarks on ethical trade-offs at the sustainability/finance interface by contrasting shareholders’ interest in short-term financial returns with society’s interest in counteracting ecological and social grievances. Scrutinizing share repurchases, we investigate a firm’s communicated sustainability orientation (i.e., its environmental and social value orientation) as well as its environmental and social sustainability performance. Our results are based on a large-scale panel dataset of 491 U.S. firms observed from 2004 to 2016. The dataset combines share buyback data with sustainability orientation scores from shareholder letters and sustainability performance ratings. The econometric models suggest no association between social value orientation and repurchase volumes, but a significantly negative relationship between environmental value orientation and buybacks in a cubic form. Executive stock options partially attenuate this relationship. Share repurchases in turn negatively affect future environmental and social performance. This study grasps the consequences of firms’ short-term shareholder satisfaction and discusses its ethical implications in the context of firms’ contribution to sustainable development, thereby providing important insights to the business ethics discourse.

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Organisational agility, a specific dynamic capability, constitutes a key success factor in today’s dynamic business environments. However, it is unclear whether and how firms’ knowledge-based capital enables organisational agility. Moreover, mechanisms through which organisational agility translates knowledge-based capital into innovation performance are poorly understood. This study fills these gaps by investigating direct effects of knowledge-based capital (i.e., human, social, and organisational capital) on organisational agility and, in turn, indirect effects on radical and incremental innovation performance. Leveraging survey data from 385 German firms, this study contributes to the organisational agility and the strategic innovation management literature. First, our analysis validates human and social capital as antecedents of organisational agility, yielding evidence for the premises of the knowledge-based view in a novel context. Second, it substantiates the dynamic capability view as a pivotal theoretical lens for explaining the mechanisms underlying the relationships between firms’ knowledge-based capital, organisational agility, and incremental innovation performance.