Stakeholder pressure, corporate environmental ethics and green innovation

ABSTRACT Enterprise green innovation is driven by a variety of factors, the existing literature focuses on the direct impact of institutional pressure, lacking considering other types of stakeholders. There is also a lack of attention to the leadership and environmental awareness of entrepreneurs. This paper thereby takes 278 enterprises as a sample to discuss the driving mechanism of stakeholders’ regulatory pressure, normative pressure, and imitation pressure, from three aspects of the government, customers, and competitors, on enterprises’ green innovation, respectively. The results of hierarchical regression analysis show that: first, stakeholder pressure can promote corporate environmental ethics and green innovation. Moreover, corporate environmental ethics plays an intermediary role between stakeholder pressure and green innovation. In addition, entrepreneurs’ responsible leadership positively moderates the positive relationship between stakeholder pressure and corporate environmental ethics, while entrepreneurs’ environmental awareness positively moderates the positive relationship between stakeholder pressure and enterprise green innovation.