Ask a room full of business students whether companies can be a force for good, and the responses often fall into two familiar camps.
One perspective argues that business is fundamentally about profit and that social impact efforts are largely performative. The other argues that business systems are too structurally flawed to produce meaningful positive change at all.
Professor Garima Sharma’s research suggests both perspectives capture part of the truth—but neither fully explains the complexity organizations actually face.
Sharma’s research does not dismiss the idea that businesses can create meaningful social value. In many cases, the evidence supports it.
Research on B Corporations, social enterprises, and sustainability initiatives demonstrates that organizations can improve communities, expand access, and develop innovative responses to social and environmental problems.
“I've been studying sustainability for the last 15 years,” Sharma explains, “and in my experience, business can absolutely be a force for good.”
For Sharma, these examples are not abstract theories. They reflect observable organizational outcomes shaped by deliberate leadership, systems, and long-term commitment.
At the same time, Sharma’s work challenges the assumption that positive impact emerges automatically from good intentions.
Organizations do not become socially responsible simply because leaders want them to. Sharma’s research suggests that the tension between doing good and doing well requires continuous organizational navigation.
“It doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen just because a CEO means well,” Sharma notes. “How it happens—it requires being honest about the tensions between doing good and doing well, and navigating them deliberately.”
That emphasis on deliberate action reflects a broader theme across Sharma’s research: social impact depends on systems, incentives, accountability structures, and leadership practices that can sustain competing priorities over time.
Rather than framing business as either inherently beneficial or inherently harmful, Sharma encourages leaders and students to work within the tension between those realities.
Organizations can simultaneously generate innovation, economic opportunity, and social value while also contributing to inequality, environmental harm, or exclusion. Those outcomes can coexist within the same institution and sometimes within the same decision-making process.
Sharma’s research on organizational paradoxes suggests that effective leadership depends less on eliminating these tensions and more on learning how to navigate them productively.
Her own academic path reflects that perspective. Originally trained as an engineer in Indore, India, Sharma transitioned into organizational research after recognizing that many of the most important business problems resist clean or permanent solutions.
The question of whether business can be a force for good extends far beyond the classroom.
It shapes how organizations recruit employees, how investors allocate capital, how consumers evaluate brands, and how policymakers regulate markets.
Sharma’s research suggests that overly simplistic answers can create risks on both sides.
Leaders who assume business is naturally beneficial may overlook structural problems such as incentive misalignment, weak accountability systems, or institutional pressures that produce harmful outcomes even inside well-intentioned organizations.
At the same time, leaders who assume business is incapable of meaningful impact may disengage from institutions that possess the scale, infrastructure, and resources necessary to drive systemic change.
Sharma’s research points to several broader lessons for organizations attempting to balance financial performance with social impact:
For Sharma, the organizations doing the most meaningful work are not necessarily the ones that have resolved the tension between profit and purpose. They are often the ones that have learned how to operate effectively inside it.
At the Kogod School of Business at American University, Sharma’s teaching reflects the same perspective that shapes her research.
Rather than offering students simple answers about whether business is good or bad, Sharma encourages them to engage critically with the tensions that define modern organizations.
Her broader research suggests that future business leaders will increasingly need the ability to navigate ambiguity, competing priorities, and unresolved organizational challenges.
For Sharma, the goal is not to eliminate complexity. It is to help leaders develop the capacity to work thoughtfully and deliberately within it.