Technology Characteristics, Stakeholder Pressure, Social Influence, and Green Innovation: Empirical Evidence from Chinese Express Companies

Abstract

Over the past decade, the rapid development of e-commerce and express industries in China has resulted in huge environmental costs. Compared with manufacturing industries, the values of green innovation are less recognized in logistics industries. To promote the green practices in logistic enterprises, it is imperative to have a thorough understanding of the determinants of green innovation adoption. To this end, this paper performs an empirical investigation into the intentions to adopt green innovation from 196 Chinese express companies. The determinant variables were constructed from the perspective of technology characteristics (perceived green usefulness and perceived integration ease of use), stakeholder pressure (government, customer, and platform pressures), and social influence. Then, a 20-item scale was designed based on the literature review and expert opinions. The results revealed the significant positive effects of technology characteristics and social influence on the intentions to adopt green innovation. Meanwhile, only the platform pressure was significant with the adopting intentions among the variables from stakeholder pressure. Moreover, variables from technology characteristics were found to have meditation effects between social influence and adopting intentions. Based on the findings, theoretical and practical implications are proposed to promote the green and sustainable development of express companies in China.

Revisiting Stakeholder Theory and Environmentalism: Evidence from an Emerging Economy

“…This result is not consistent with the previous findings of many researchers, i.e., [7,8,28,36,[73][74][75]. Some of the recent studies from China [76], Korea [77], and Pakistan [78] have also found customer pressure as an insignificant predictor of e-commerce adopting intentions to green innovation. We propose here that the difference in the result is due to the difference in the context of developed and developing/emerging economies.…”

Corporate Environmentalism: An Emerging Economy Perspective

“…This result differs from the previous findings of Banerjee et al [13] and Fraj-Andres et al [14], whose studies, conducted in the US and Spain, respectively, identified customer concern as a determining factor of corporate environmentalism. However, few recent studies from developing economies also found customers as inconsequential stakeholders [24,34,35]. We propose that the differing result can be explained by the differences in the two contexts.…”

“…Pedersen and Neergaard [33] argued that the green consumer is a rare and exclusive demographic. Seifert, Damert and Guenther [24], while studying the impact of hospital clients on the environmental management system of German hospitals, found customers as irrelevant stakeholders, and Zhang et al [34] found customers' pressures as an insignificant predictor of firms adopting intentions to green innovation in China. In addition, according to Raiz et al [35], customer priorities and their environmental guidelines are very different in emerging markets.…”

“…While developing countries are far behind developed nations in designing and implementing environmental regulations [31], the existence of regulatory pressures made manufacturers in China and Turkey improve their environmental behavior [28]. However, Zhang et al [34] found government pressures having insignificant impact on firms which were adopting intentions to green innovation in China. Similarly, these government regulations are directly linked with the increase in the operating cost for the firms [29] which may reduce the intentions of firms to follow them.…”

Green Innovation Practices and Its Impacts on Environmental and Organizational Performance

“…This study fills the gap in investigating these constructs in the manufacturing and service industries to enrich existing GI practices and stakeholder pressure literature. Moreover, stakeholder pressure (customer) was examined for GI in third party logistic firms ( Chu et al, 2019 ), as well as in express companies ( Zhang et al, 2020 ), and in manufacturing firms ( Song et al, 2020 ). Those three studies were conducted in China’s context, which highlights the issue of conducting and focusing on the stakeholder pressure in the manufacturing and service industries of Pakistan being a developing economy in the initial stages of GI practices adoption ( Shahzad M. et al, 2020 ).…”