Toward sustainable development: Board characteristics, country governance quality, and environmental performance

Abstract

The objective of this study is to examine the effects of board characteristics and country governance quality on both individual aspects and the overall level of environmental performance through the lens of agency, resource dependency, and institutional theories. The study is based on a sample of 3023 firm-year observations from European companies operating in 22 countries between 2009 and 2016. Data on the resources, emissions, and innovation dimensions of environmental performance and board governance data were collected from the Refinitiv database, whereas financial data were extracted from the Worldscope database. The study employs a multilevel modeling analysis and the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique to analyze the data. The findings suggest that board gender diversity and the presence of a corporate social responsibility and sustainability committee have a positive impact on environmental performance. The results also show that country governance quality is positively related to environmental performance. The findings have important implications for practitioners, regulators, and policymakers with respect to the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms and country governance systems in determining corporate environmental practices.

Environmental Performance of the Tourism Sector from a Gender Diversity Perspective

“…The argument is that women board members focus more on social and environmental issues [47,138,139]. Therefore, the evidence provided by this study contradicts studies that indicate that board gender diversity is positively related to environmental performance [44,[86][87][88] and reduced resource use and emissions [27,85,140]. These discrepancies can be explained by the complex relationship between board gender diversity and responsible practices [141], which may be determined by the unique characteristics of the context [142].…”

“…This relationship has been confirmed for samples from various countries and regions. Specifically, studies have been conducted in the United States [26,42,43,50,64,83], France [47], the United Kingdom [25], China [86], Australia [85], Europe [27,77,88] and globally [44,73,96].…”

Women in top echelon positions and their effects on sustainability: a review, synthesis and future research agenda

“…Focusing on environmental performance, some studies find a positive relationship between female directors and environmental performance (e.g. Lopatta et al, 2020;Orazalin & Mahmood, 2021). As anticipated in the previous section, the participation in sustainability-themed alliances, associated with a high representation of women on the BoD, positively affect the corporate environmental performance (Post et al, 2015).…”

The mediating effect of sustainability strategy between sustainability committees and business performance: can persistent assessment condition this effect?

“…For example, we can highlight, as a normative pressure, the recommendations of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (International Institute for Sustainable Development IISD, 2007), in which the creation of a new sustainability committee is suggested. Additionally, the implementation of a sustainability committee can be explained by mimetic pressure emerging from other organizations in the environment (Baraibar‐Diez and Odriozola, 2019; Orazalin and Mahmood, 2021). Then, there are coercive, normative and mimetic isomorphic pressures that lead organizations to adopt a sustainability committee as part of their governance body (Beddewela and Fairbrass, 2016).…”

“…The previous literature has tested the positive interaction between the presence of a sustainability committee and the levels of sustainability performance (Biswas et al , 2018; Danvila et al , 2019; Peters et al , 2019; Orazalin, 2020; Orazalin and Mahmood, 2021; Uyar et al , 2021) [3]. This positive effect increases with a diversified composition of this committee (Hillman et al , 2002; Carter et al , 2010; Ramon-Llorens et al , 2021).…”