Greenwashing and environmental communication: Effects on stakeholders' perceptions

Abstract

Since the first Earth Day in the 1970s, corporate environmental performance has increased dramatically, and cases of greenwashing have increased sharply. The term greenwash refers to a variety of different misleading communications that aim to form overly positive beliefs among stakeholders about a company's environmental practices. The growing number of corporate social responsibility claims, whether founded or not, creates difficulties for stakeholders in distinguishing between truly positive business performance and companies that only appear to embrace a model of sustainable development. In this context, through the lens of legitimacy and signalling theory, we intend to understand and assess the different influences that various types of misleading communications about environmental issues have on stakeholders' perceptions of corporate environmental responsibility and greenwashing. Stakeholder responses to an environmental scandal will also be assessed. The hypotheses tested through a four-for-two design experiment reveal that different levels of greenwashing have a significantly different influence on stakeholders' perceptions of corporate environmental responsibility and stakeholders' reactions to environmental scandals.

Drivers, adoption, and evaluation of sustainability practices in Italian wine SMEs

“…At the internal level, key concerns referred to investments in capital (Dodds et al, ), labor, and time (Pomarici et al, ), whereas the most important barriers linked to the external environment were the bureaucracy and the abuse of the sustainability concept (Szolnoki, ). The latter, also known as greenwashing, was even ranked second, after additional labor efforts, and is known to be a key challenge for wine industries (Berghoef & Dodds, ; Delmas & Grant, ; McEwan & Bek, ) as it may affect stakeholders' perceptions (Delmas & Burbano, ; Torelli, Balluchi, & Lazzini, ). The issue of greenwashing may also be related to another external barrier, namely, the lack of uniform norms, something which has also been stressed in literature (Mariani & Vastola, ; Pullman et al, ).…”

Using reputation for corporate sustainability to tackle banks digitalization challenges

“…One such method is to let parties rate them (Jøsang et al, 2007; Resnick & Zeckhauser, 2002), be it via third party evaluations, word of mouth (Dean & Lang, 2008), or expert endorsements (Klewes & Wreschniok, 2009). CS is another alternative for generating reputation (Miras‐Rodríguez, Carrasco‐Gallego, & Escobar‐Pérez, 2015; Delgado‐Márquez & Pedauga, 2017; Fanasch, 2019; Kim et al, 2009; Lai, Melloni, & Stacchezzini, 2016; Miras‐Rodríguez et al, 2017; Orlitzky, Schmidt, & Rynes, 2003; Park, 2018; Torelli, Balluchi, & Lazzini, 2019). In the case of the financial sector, CS strategies helped to restore damaged reputations in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis (Dell'Atti et al, 2017; Englert et al, 2018; Forcadell & Aracil, 2017a; Gallego‐Álvarez & Pucheta‐Martínez, 2019; Pérez & del Bosque, 2015).…”

What makes businesses commit to nature conservation?

“…Table S3), most of which might not count as high environmental impact industries. Research by Torelli et al (2019) found that stakeholders had higher perceptions of corporate greenwashing and stronger reactions to environmental scandals if the companies belonged to environmentally sensitive industries, such as mining, energy or chemicals. Therefore, companies in our sample might have felt to be under relatively low stakeholder scrutiny with subsequently lower greenwashing risk.…”

“…In contrast to benefits, firms could also experience disadvantages from an engagement for nature conservation. They might be accused of greenwashing (Torelli et al, 2019) or criticised for supporting conservation goals that are controversially discussed in society and politics (Krause & Matzdorf, 2019). H1 The more favourable the attitude towards nature conservation, the more likely a company's voluntary nature conservation engagement.…”

“…Communication and image gains were important benefit expectations from such an engagement, whereas the fear of greenwashing accusations appeared to be a relevant barrier (ibid.). Torelli, Balluchi, and Lazzini (2019) explained that stakeholder scepticism towards corporate environmental communication can lead to a reduced social legitimacy of a company or product with subsequent reductions in stakeholder purchase, investment or employment intentions. In line with environmental management studies, for example, Boiral, Talbot, and Paillé (2015) and Papagiannakis and Lioukas (2018), Krause and Matzdorf (2019) echoed the importance of a manager's personal motivation to protect nature.…”