Impact of Entrepreneur's Environmental Attitudes on Corporate Environmental Responsibility

Abstract

The impact of personal characteristics, beliefs, values and attitudes of the entrepreneur on firm's culture and business practices, is substantive. These aspects of the founder coupled with the institutional environment of the firm, affect the investment, efforts and involvement of the firm in a multitude of activities. With regard to activities that impact the natural environment, this paper argues that the environmental attitudes of entrepreneurs have a strong influence on the corporate environmental responsibility (CER) of the firm that are in turn moderated by the need for legitimacy by new entrepreneurial firms. The role of imprinting is examined to understand how founders' attitudes impact their firm's CER activities. A further contribution is the creation of a taxonomy of sub-categories of CER activities that illustrate the level of engagement of the firm.