How top management's environmental awareness affect corporate green competitive advantage: evidence from China
ISSN: 0368-492X
Article publication date: 28 May 2021
Issue publication date: 22 February 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Green ambidexterity innovation and green competitive advantage are of great significance to enterprises' sustainable development. From the perspective of upper echelons theory, This paper aims to investigate the role of top managers in gaining green competitive advantage and the intermediary effect of the green ambidexterity innovation between them.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses empirical data from heavily polluting enterprises in China for constructing a model to infer how enterprises achieve the green competitive advantage.
Findings
The paper shows that (a) top managers' environmental awareness and the green ambidexterity innovation are both positively related to the green competitive advantage of enterprises, while there is a difference between the exploitative green innovation and the exploratory green innovation regarding the heterogeneity; the positive effect of the exploratory green innovation on enterprises' green competitive advantage is greater than that of the exploitative green innovation; (b) the green ambidexterity innovation plays a partial intermediary effect between top managers' environmental awareness and enterprises' green competitive advantage and (c) strategic flexibility positively moderates the relation between the green ambidexterity innovation and the green competitive advantage. The study concludes that top managers' environmental awareness has a significantly positive impact on reinforcing green competitive advantages and adopting the green ambidexterity innovation for heavily polluting enterprises in China.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the green innovation management literature by offering a theoretical framework for examining how top managers' environmental awareness influences enterprises' green competitive advantage.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: The Research was supported by National Natural Science foundation of China (grant no. 71774105) and Humanities and Social Sciences Funding Project of Ministry of Education in China (project no. 17YJA63004).
Citation
Cao, C., Tong, X., Chen, Y. and Zhang, Y. (2022), "How top management's environmental awareness affect corporate green competitive advantage: evidence from China", Kybernetes, Vol. 51 No. 3, pp. 1250-1279. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-01-2021-0065
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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