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The impact of environmental sustainability and knowledge dynamics on entrepreneurial growth and internationalization could do with added research focus. However, the rising importance of corporate sustainability and social responsibility in global business and entrepreneurship increasingly requires that these interdependencies be assessed. We assess these dynamics empirically through both quantitative and qualitative analyses. With the former, we employ a cross-sectional sample of Finnish small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to illustrate the impact of learning orientation and environmental sustainability on their growth and internationalization. Specifically, we find that their impacts on entrepreneurial growth depend on the stage of their internationalization: Learning orientation predicts first foreign market entry among the enterprises, while environmental orientation predicts the subsequent performance among internationally operating enterprises. In addition, we find no moderation or mediation effects between learning orientation and sustainability, suggesting that their impacts are distinct from each other. We conclude by discussing these results and their implications on international entrepreneurial growth, and knowledge and sustainability dynamics in the entrepreneurial context.

External economic and social forces compel foodservice enterprises to be environmentally friendly, bringing environmental issues to the forefront of managerial policies. Reflecting on this phenomenon, this paper aims to investigate the role that the environmental leadership of the top management at the franchise headquarters and the companies’ environmental orientation play in enhancing the company’s market and eco performances.

The research model was tested based on responses from 196 regional foodservice franchising headquarters in South Korea. Structural equation modeling, namely, confirmatory and path analysis, was the primary method of data analysis in the study.

Results indicate that the top management’s environmental transformational leadership influences the internal and external environmental orientation of a foodservice franchise firm. Also, the two types of environmental orientation improve the market and eco performances of the firm. Finally, two dimensions of environmental orientation, internal and external, act as full mediators of the relationship between environmental transformational leadership and the performance of the firm.

The positive link between environmental leadership, environmental orientation and market performance seems to indicate that individual franchisees may be receptive to rules and regulations associated with green practices and be willing to incorporate the green business procedures of their franchisor into their day-to-day operations.

Given the lack of empirical research that investigates environmental policies in the foodservice industry in the international context, this study contributes to an understanding of how foodservice franchising firms view the environmental leadership of the company’s top management and its impact on a company’s environmental orientation and market performance.

Using the institutional and natural resource-based view theories, the purpose of this study is to examine the influence of religious, cultural and mimetic orientations on proactive environmental strategy, corporate environmental responsibility and traditional environmental strategy. Relying on data collected from managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the study further examines how proactive environmental strategy, corporate environmental responsibility and traditional environmental strategy drive relational capital and firm performance of SMEs operating in Ghana.

The study employed a survey research design, a quantitative approach and a partial least square structural equation modelling technique in making data analysis and interpretations due to its appropriateness for predictive research models.

The results suggest that mimetic orientation robustly and significantly influence the dimensions of environmental orientation. While religious orientation only had a robust and significant influence on proactive environmental strategy, cultural orientation robustly and significantly influences both proactive and traditional environmental strategies. Despite the positive and significant interactions that exist between proactive environmental strategy, corporate environmental responsibility, traditional environmental strategy, relational capital and firm performance, the findings particularly revealed that proactive and environmental strategies insignificantly correlated with relational capital contrary to past study findings.

The study is among the few to examine how religious, cultural and mimetic orientations interrelate with proactive and traditional environmental orientations, relational capital and firm performance in an emerging economy. Based on the findings, implications and directions for future research are discussed while also providing guidance for policymakers, regulatory bodies, scholars and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of business analytics and environmental orientation toward green innovation and green competitive advantage. In addition, the study aims to explore the mediating role of green innovation in the impact of business analytics and environmental orientation on green competitive advantage.

Based upon the theoretical analysis of existing literature, several hypotheses have been developed. Data was gathered using a survey method. The survey was conducted using online portal, 388 valid responses have been processed using SPSS 23.0 and AMOS 23.0 for empirical analysis. Two steps were used, first reliability and validity have been measured. Following this, the authors employed structural equation modeling technique to test hypothetical relationships.

The results from the authors’ empirical analysis indicate that business analytics and environmental orientation have a pivotal role toward green innovation as well as green competitive advantage. If the results are seen comparatively, then it can be indicated that the role of business analytics is more powerful compared with the environmental orientation. Although environmental orientation is a key factor of green innovation, but its direct role toward green competitive advantage is not so strong. Similarly, to check the other mechanisms, the role of green innovation as a mediator was explored. Empirical findings have established the mediating role of green innovation in the influence of business analytics and environmental orientation on green competitive advantage. Thus, the results confirm a mechanism of green innovation in the impact of business analytics and environmental orientation on green competitive advantage.

The study captures the attention of decision-makers and highlights that business leaders need to emphasize on business analytics while making managerial decisions related to green innovation and green competitive advantage.

For the first time, this study explored the role of business analytics and environmental orientation together toward green innovation and green competitive advantage. The study adds value to the existing literature and opens new avenues for scholarly research in the area of managerial decision-making.

Green sustainability has become a critical challenge for businesses to execute green supply chain management (GSCM). Most of the literature on GSCM emphasizes regulations as drivers and few pieces of research are conducted from an internal organizational culture view. This study aims to use the cultural perspective of market orientation (MO) and draws on both the natural resource-based view (NRBV) and dynamic capability view (DCV) to explore the relationships among green market orientation (GMO), GSCM capability and organizational performance.

A total of 1,000 survey questionnaires were distributed to the Taiwanese electronics industry and 207 valid questionnaires were collected. Data was analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results show that GMOs have a significant positive impact on GSCM capability, environmental performance and economic performance. Moreover, GSCM capability is positively related to environmental and economic performance. The results also show that GMOs have a significant indirect influence on environmental performance and economic performance through GSCM capability.

The findings of this study suggest how Taiwan’s electrical and electronic manufacturers, while faced with pressure from competitors, customers and regulations (i.e. waste electrical and electronic equipment directive, Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive and energy-using products directives), should efficiently and effectively implement GMO and enhance GSCM capability to improve organizational performance.

This study fills up the gap between MO and performance indistinct relationships. It has also integrated two perspectives, namely, NRBV and DCV, to explain GSCM capability as a mediator between GMO and organizational performance relationship and to examine the relationships among GMO, GSCM capability and organizational performance.

This study aims to investigates the effect of three customer orientation components – customer information-processing, responsiveness and values and norms – on a firm’s decision to adopt environmental management practices. Consistent with the literature on strategy and industrial marketing, the authors also examine the moderating effect of marketplace characteristics.

The authors use a linear model on a sample of 4,324 French firms with ten or more employees.

Based on a large-scale survey of firms across industries, the results indicate that customer information-processing and values and norms directly contribute to the adoption of environmental management practices. Furthermore, the effect of customer information-processing is shown to be contingent on market competition.

The findings have direct practical implications. When managers recognize the importance and usefulness of customer orientation, they understand the need to formulate organizational strategies in terms of environmental management practices that reflect customer expectations. In addition, following the strategic fit approach, customer orientation should fit with the specific market environment to stimulate the adoption of environmental management practices. In other words, the findings are useful for managers, who can assess the specific environmental characteristics they are facing and align these with customer orientation to build competitive advantage.

The findings indicate that the different dimensions of customer orientation distinctly affect a firm’s decision to adopt environmental management practices. In this sense, the authors argue that they capture different facets of the customer orientation measure, which points to the importance of analyzing the dimensions of customer orientation separately. Furthermore, rather than analyzing aggregate measures of corporate social responsibility, the authors selected environmental orientation as a specific dimension, which has received less attention in the industrial marketing literature. Finally, the main findings mark an important contribution to the literature because they provide deeper insights into the conditions under which customer orientation dimensions drive the adoption of environmental management practices.

The purpose of this study is to develop a better theoretical and empirical understanding of the causal and contextual mechanisms explaining the relationship between customer orientation and business performance.

A three-stage least squares model was used on a sample of 3,720 French firms with 20 or more employees.

By using a moderated mediation approach, it was found that the mediating effect of environmental customer innovation on the relationship between customer orientation and business performance under different contextual factors (market environment, firm size and sector of activity) can be significantly stronger or weaker.

This analysis is restricted by the choice of one particular country, and further research should use data from other countries to develop a general understanding of the issues examined. Additionally, examining relevant mechanisms other than firm performance measures will advance the understanding of the customer orientation–firm performance linkage. Because of the fact that the majority of variables used are binary and that each survey was conducted in a particular situation and in a particular context, the picture portrayed could be biased. Because environmental issues not only concern consumers but also all other market actors, it would be highly useful to verify the obtained results using broader concepts such as Hult’s (2011) “market orientation plus” concept or the “sustainable market orientation” developed by Mitchell et al. (2010).

According to the results, to achieve market success and sustain a competitive advantage, managers must simultaneously invest in customer orientation and innovation performance. Additionally, managers should consider market environment, firm size and sector of activity as important contingencies in their decision of whether to invest in customer orientation.

This study makes an important contribution by opening up a “black box” and offers a deeper perspective on how and why customer orientation affects firm performance. In particular, rather than providing separate analyses of mediating and moderating effects, this study proposes a simultaneous analysis that reveals how and under what conditions customer orientation improves business performance.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of stakeholder orientation in mediating the impact of female directors on environmental innovation. The authors argue that female directors are eco-friendly and more concerned with multi-stakeholder interests and demands. Thus, they promote environmental innovation by including more stakeholder-oriented values and beliefs in firm decision-making.

As the dependent variable in this study is a nonnegative count variable, the authors use a count data model based on Poisson regression. A sample of Chinese listed firms between 2010 and 2020 is used to test the hypotheses.

The results of this study show that female directors can enhance environmental innovation. Further, stakeholder orientation represents an intermediate channel that accounts for the effects of female directors on environmental innovation. This suggests that having women on a board can lead to better stakeholder management, which, in turn, positively affects environmental innovation. The authors also reveal that female directors contribute more to stakeholder orientation with the presence of female chairpersons.

A significant limitation in the literature is that little attention has been paid to the mechanisms linking female directors to firm outcomes. In the context of environmental innovation, while previous studies have investigated the influence of female directors on environmental innovation, the underlying channels of that influence remain largely unexplored. Therefore, the findings of this study advance the understanding of the effects of female directors on environmental innovation by revealing an important underlying channel – stakeholder orientation.

The purpose of this paper is to link national cultural values to personal pro‐environmental value orientations, in order to investigate why the salience of pro‐environmental value orientations differs cross‐culturally. A value‐based model is proposed and tested in a multinational study.

An empirical investigation of 1,096 consumers was conducted in five nations with a different cultural profile on the two cultural dimensions in‐group collectivism and assertiveness. The paper applies multi‐group structural equation modelling to test the moderating effect of culture on the impact of pro‐environmental values on attitudes and subjective norms.

The study reveals that the influence of a pro‐environmental value orientation differs substantially, according to national cultural values. While an ecocentric value orientation is important in the US, Canadian, German, and Australian samples which hold individualistic values, an anthropocentric value orientation is salient in the Russian sample, characterized by collectivistic values. The hypothesized influence of the national cultural value assertiveness, however, could not be established decisively.

First, the present study considers culture as a national value on an aggregated level. Future studies should take into account cultural values at different levels of aggregation. Second, since only one collectivistic society is the object of the investigation, the results are limited in terms of generalizability.

In order to address the ecocentric value orientation in the analyzed individualistic societies, marketers should emphasize benefits for the environment in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Germany. By contrast, the positive consequences for humankind in general and future generations should be stressed in the collectivistic Russian sample.

The paper contributes to the literature by integrating both individual and national perspectives on the value‐based drivers of environmental concern. The study also provides insight into pro‐environmental consumer behavior in an emerging market (namely Russia), which has so far been neglected in cross‐cultural research.

Although the circular economy is widely regarded as an essential strategy for firms, the present understanding of the drivers and outcomes of circular economy implementation is underdeveloped. In this paper, the authors draw on the natural resource-based view and information processing theory to explore how an environmental orientation and digital supply chain platforms promote circular economy implementation, and increase the impact of circular economy implementation on financial performance.

The authors surveyed 249 Chinese firms and used hierarchical regression analysis to test hypotheses.

The empirical results reveal that three primary modes of circular economy implementation—reinvent and rethink (INV), restore, reduce and avoid (RRA), and recirculate (REC)—are all driven by environmental orientation and digital supply chain platforms. More interestingly, digital supply chain platforms have an inverted U-shaped moderating effect on the relationships between environmental orientation and INV and between environmental orientation and RRA. Most importantly, INV and RRA are positively related to financial performance, whereas REC does not have a significant relationship with financial performance.

The authors contribute to the literature on the circular economy by revealing new drivers and outcomes of different modes of its implementation. Additionally, the findings have implications for how firms should frame their circular economy initiatives in the context of the digital revolution.