Firms increasingly need to attend to diverse stakeholder groups with different demands and integrate a variety of sometimes-competing societal priorities within their business activities. Yet corporate sustainability research provides limited insight into how different sustainability dimensions may potentially interact, often implicitly assuming independence across diverse sustainability dimensions. We illustrate this issue by documenting how efforts to accelerate growth of green jobs to mitigate climate change appears to be associated with a negative impact in terms of slowing down progress towards meeting workforce diversity goals. Our empirical analysis relies on detailed online job profile data on over 16 million individual job positions in 713 Fortune 1000 firms in the US between 2011 and 2022. We further explore micro-level mechanisms behind this trade-off, specifically those related to the locational features typical of green jobs, as potentially driving this effect. We argue that making progress on one dimension of sustainability sometimes have undesirable effects on another dimension, thus highlighting potential trade-offs among different dimensions within sustainability, challenging that these can be pursued independently. In doing so, we contribute to the emerging literature on the multiplicity of dimensions within sustainability and the potential trade-offs encountered in managing across multiple dimensions.
