Organizational Learning and Green Innovation: Does Environmental Proactivity Matter?

Abstract

Emerging economies face the challenge of striking a balance between development and the environment. To adapt to the changes, organizations must develop dynamic capabilities for green innovation and corporate sustainability. Based on a resource-based view integrated with contingency and stakeholder theories, this study examines how strategic contingency makes differences in the transformation between learning and performance resources through innovation efforts. Oriented toward external and internal stakeholders, respectively, learning resources comprise absorptive capacity and transformative capability, innovation efforts include green product innovation and green process innovation, and performance resources contain green image and competitive advantage. Depicting their mediating relationships moderated by environmental proactivity, the research model is supported by survey observations collected from over 300 organizations in China. Environmentally proactive organizations are found to have more balanced dynamic capability development than those that are more reactive. To optimize green innovation, therefore, organizations need to embrace an ecological strategy and engage employees in learning.

The nexus of business sustainability and organizational learning: A systematic literature review to identify key learning principles for business transformation

“…With respect to the learning objectives, a prevalent framing related to learning objectives is the RBV, seeing sustainability knowledge as an organizational resource driving competitive advantage (e.g., Belle, 2017;Bilan, Hussain, Haseeb, & Kot, 2020;Carter, 2005;Zhang, Sun, Yang, & Li, 2018). Yang and Park (2016) conclude that from a competitive standpoint, external knowledge exchange negatively impacts a firm's achievement of sustainable innovation.…”

Environmental orientation and firm performance

“…Shareholders expect firms to balance environmental effects of a product and/or service that could show up in life cycle and resource usage in a way that would harm the environment in a minimum level. Towards these expectations, firms are required to develop their 15 green innovation performances (Zhang et al, 2018). According to Chen, Lai & Wen (2006), green innovation is described as energy saving, pollution prevention, waste recycle, or hardware or software innovation related with green products and processes including innovations in technologies in green product designs or organizational environment managements, and It is studied separately as "green product innovation" and "green process innovation".…”

Profiting from Green Innovation: The Moderating Effect of Competitive Strategy

“…Given the importance of green innovation in environmental sustainability [31], several scholars have explored its performance implications. Some propose and find a positive effect of green innovation on firm performance [9,32]. For example, Chiou et al [33] suggest that green innovation can enhance firms' environmental performance and improve competitive advantages by increasing support from stakeholders.…”

“…Previous studies have provided diverse arguments and mixed findings for the relationship between green innovation and firm performance. While some scholars suggest green innovation enhances firm performance by attracting more social support from firms' stakeholders [32,33], others argue that green innovation is often decoupled from firm competitiveness since it may be a mere response to stakeholders' nonmarket claims [9,36]. To disentangle the complex relationship between green innovation and firm performance, an examination on the moderating effects not only helps to delineate the conditions in which green innovation serves as means of value creation, but also to clarify different theoretical arguments in the extant literature.…”