Empirical investigation of extended TOE model on Corporate Environment Sustainability and dimensions of operating performance of SMEs: A high order PLS-ANN approach

Abstract

The goal of economic expansion, which ignores social welfare and environmental restrictions, has been supplanted in the business environment. The paper investigates how corporate environmental sustainability affects sundry parts of a company's performance. The study question is dichotomized into two segments. Firstly, examine the effect of selected dimensions, such as Economic, Social, Technological, and Organizational factors, on Corporate Environment Sustainability. Secondly, to validate and prove the mediating effect of CES on firm performance with selected manifests. A total of 390 respondents from SMEs were analyzed systematically. The synergy of Smart-PLS and Artificial Neural Network determines the impact of environmental sustainability on the various dimensions of a firm's performance that yielding a novel insight that would render vital benefit to stakeholders while drawing the policies related to sustainable development. The findings reveal that corporate environmental sustainability plays a significant role in shaping the relationships between technological, organizational, environmental, and social factors and SMEs' operating performance. The study is the first to empirically validate and evaluate the multimodal framework by extending TOE and TBL theorem. This theoretical nexus can be a pathfinder for policymakers, administrators, and managers to enhance SMEs' performance. Additionally, the validity of this construct in the study has been empirically reinforced statistically.