This study examines how Chinese firms began responding to worsening environmental concerns in the late 1990s. Combining predictions from control theory, escalation of commitment, and goal theory, we seek to explain how leaders' cognitions shape the formation of novel responses to the value-laden issue of corporate greening. We propose an iterative model that links leaders' principles with corporate actions and test it using survey data gathered from 360 firms. The model views strategy organically, as a set of adaptive goals and behaviors, and highlights the role of systemic and local feedback loops in strategy formation. We find that top executives who champion new strategic initiatives monitor early success or failure, and adjust their efforts to match early performance feedback. Perceptions of satisfactory performance strengthen leaders' efforts towards their initial target, while perceptions of unsatisfactory performance diminish them. This feedback relationship is invariant throughout favorable or unfavorable expectancies of success, contrary to the contingent prediction of control theory. The model also examines how top-down and bottom-up strategic initiatives combine to help firms maintain a positive momentum of change when champions' efforts decline in the face of premature failure signals.
This study explores the influence of national culture upon leaders' interpretations of corporate environmentalism. The first part of the paper reviews the theoretical and empirical premises for a common interpretation of corporate environmentalism across countries. Three dimensions of corporate environmental performance are distilled from the qualitative literature developed in North America: organizational embeddedness, capacity to undertake environmental actions, and responsibility for protecting nature. We develop a survey instrument to measure corporate environmentalism and collect data from two random samples of Chinese (Shanghai-based) and Japanese executives. Exploratory factor analyses suggest that North American, Chinese, and Japanese executives employ three similar dimensions to interpret the corporate environmental performance of their companies. Using these dimensions, the second part of the study compares the overall degree of corporate environmental performance reported on the average by Chinese and Japanese executives. The study also investigates the influence of national culture, environmental values and socioeconomic contexts upon firm-level greening in both countries.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.