Abstract
The contaminating effects of economic activity and the scarcity of natural resources has led firms to a situation in which corporate strategy has been compromised by environmental issues. The objective of this paper is to analyse some of the factors determining the pro-environmental change process by considering the drivers encouraging firms to progress in environmental protection and the barriers that curb this progress. Using a structural equation model implemented on a sample of 303 firms, our results confirm a direct and positive effect of stakeholder pressure and of the expectations of obtaining competitive advantages from the pro-environmental change process. The results also confirmed the indirect effect of stakeholder pressure on pro-environmental change through managers’ expectations of obtaining competitive advantages, which play a mediating role in the firm’s response. Although managers interpret the barriers we have studied as obstacles to adopting environmental protection measures, they do not prevent any firm from reaching advanced levels of pro-environmental change.
Highlights
The environmental affinity of the consumer society of the twenty-first century is changing and progressing vertiginously
There are several studies that have listed, classified, and analysed important drivers that can help businesses progress towards advanced or proactive strategies of environmental behaviour [4,5]. This trend includes the line of research that has put forward stakeholder pressure as one of the main drivers of environmental proactivity [6,7,8]
External barriers are related to the environment and they are usually associated with a lack of accessible and affordable infrastructures, technologies, and information to make headway in the pro-environmental change process and a rigid, complex, and changing regulatory pressure [18]
Summary
The environmental affinity of the consumer society of the twenty-first century is changing and progressing vertiginously. There are several studies that have listed, classified, and analysed important drivers that can help businesses progress towards advanced or proactive strategies of environmental behaviour [4,5] This trend includes the line of research that has put forward stakeholder pressure as one of the main drivers of environmental proactivity [6,7,8]. The main contributions of this work to the literature are: (i) the specification of a joint model to analyse drivers and obstacles simultaneously in the pro-environmental change process; (ii) the study of a stakeholder pressure model that considers managers’ expectations of obtaining a competitive advantages as a mediating factor when responding to this pressure. The study provides relevant results that are presented in the last discussion and conclusions section
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