Abstract
Stakeholder pressures and corporate environmental strategies continue to be important topics of corporate sustainability. Limited by sample size, there is a lack of general conclusions on which groups of stakeholder pressures are the main drivers of environmental strategies. Amassing a database of 58 empirical studies, the authors divided stakeholder pressures into four groups—internal, coercive, market, and social pressure—and explored the relationship between different pressures and environmental strategies by conducting a meta-analysis. The main result shows that internal pressure is the main driver of environmental strategies. Further empirical results show that stakeholder pressures could have a larger effect on corporate environmental strategies in developed countries and that non-manufacturing firms could change their environmental strategies more easily than manufacturing firms. The results provide the practical implication that a green industry transition is strongly needed in the manufacturing industry, especially for polluting industries, and that firms in polluting industries should implement environmental strategy changes in the future. This paper contributes to clarifying the relationship between stakeholder pressures and corporate environmental strategies based on a meta-analysis.
Highlights
Research on corporate environmental strategies started in the late 1980s and early 1990s [1,2], and the impact of stakeholder pressure on corporate environmental strategies is one of the important branches of this research
This paper aims to bridge the systematic results of stakeholder pressures and environmental strategies based on the empirical results of existing research, in order to further clarify the mechanism of stakeholder pressures on environmental strategies and obtain a general conclusion
Stakeholder pressures have a significantly positive impact on corporate environmental strategies, which is consistent with the results of current studies [37]
Summary
Research on corporate environmental strategies started in the late 1980s and early 1990s [1,2], and the impact of stakeholder pressure on corporate environmental strategies is one of the important branches of this research. As the core subjects of environmental governance, businesses are faced with regulations from the government and with supervision from Non-Government Organizations and the public. From the inside of corporations, in order to meet the environmental demands of various external stakeholders, businesses need to develop their strategies to improve their environmental behaviors, pay attention to their construction of environmental strategies, and change how they respond to environmental pressures from different stakeholders to obtain legitimacy [3]. The relationship between stakeholder pressures and corporate environmental strategies is mainly examined from two perspectives—a stakeholder-based view that focuses on how a company’s different stakeholder groups influence their environmental strategies [4,5] and a neo-institutional based view, which focuses on how a company responds to institutional pressures [6]. Das et al [9] determined that corporate environmental strategies exert an insignificant direct influence on voluntary environmental behavior
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