Abstract
Purpose
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology permeating various sectors, corporate management has increasingly directed their focus toward AI-driven innovation. Particularly, in response to escalating environmental standards, chief executive officers (CEOs) of manufacturing companies are turning to AI as a strategic tool to address challenges in green innovation. This paper aims to reveal the complex relationship between CEO AI orientation and green innovation through the attention-based view. Furthermore, it seeks to explore strategies to enhance corporate green innovation leveraging CEO AI orientation.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses computer-assisted text analysis to extract data from annual reports of listed Chinese manufacturing companies and assesses them using negative binomial regression.
Findings
The empirical findings indicate the inverted U-shaped relationship between CEO orientation and green innovation. Initial green innovation performance increases with CEO AI orientation, reaching a peak before declining. Moreover, as CEO AI orientation increases, companies with higher levels of human resource slack are likely to reach the peak of green innovation earlier.
Originality/value
Firstly, this paper introduces CEO AI orientation as a novel factor within the framework of the attention-based view for understanding green innovation. Secondly, the study investigates both the benefit effect and the cost effect (resource constraints) of CEO AI orientation on green innovation, examining the inverted U-shaped relationship between CEO orientation and green innovation. Thirdly, this paper explores the moderating effect of human resource slack on the relationship between CEO AI orientation and green innovation, setting the boundaries of CEO AI orientation’s impact on green innovation.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Research funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72072047]; the Humanities and Social Sciences Project of Ministry of Education in China [grant number 20YJC630090]; the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province [grant number ZR2023QG010]; the Social Science Planning Project of Shandong Province [grant number 22CSDJ03]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number HIT.HSS.ESD202310] and the Research Project on Graduates’ Education and Teaching Reform [grant number 23MS011].
Citation
Wang, X. and Wu, W. (2024), "CEO AI orientation, human resources and green innovation: an attention-based view", Kybernetes, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-04-2024-0964
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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