Abstract
Environmental management is becoming increasingly important within organizations and forms an essential part of their strategies. As customers are more concerned with the care of the environment, companies are required to be more aware of their actions. Consequently, companies must ignore their historical mindsets and assumptions to be able to adopt green-oriented practices and processes. Our specific research questions are: (i) How can firms become (more) green-oriented? and (ii) how can knowledge-based organizational capabilities drive this shift into greener companies, which may enhance green customer capital? The research model describes how the complementary roles of absorptive capacity (direct effect) and the fostering of an organizational unlearning context (moderating effect) affects green customer capital within the Spanish automotive component manufacturing sector. Empirical results reveal that to create green customer capital, companies should absorb new knowledge and build a context of organizational unlearning. In today’s competitive environment, knowledge rapidly becomes obsolete, so companies need to encourage unlearning to make space for new knowledge that meets environmental needs and keeps pace with changing customer preferences. The research hypotheses were tested using partial least squares (PLS) path-modeling.
Highlights
The increasing number of international environmental regulations and growing environmental awareness among customers are two trends that are affecting businesses around the world
We focus our study on the Spanish automotive component manufacturing sector (AMCS) because it stands as an innovative and knowledge-intensive industry
Since environmental management is becoming increasingly important within organizations and forms an essential part of organizational strategies, companies are urged to ask whether what do they know about their stakeholders and how they currently operate is leading to success
Summary
The increasing number of international environmental regulations and growing environmental awareness among customers are two trends that are affecting businesses around the world. These trends are changing a firm’s ability to achieve a competitive advantage [1,2]. 30 years ago, companies used to carry out strategies, activities, processes or routines that did not include the preservation or enhancement of the environment. Taking it into account, we can observe that companies have been working during a long time in an opposite way to the current one. Companies must forget their way of acting through the unlearning of their business models and routines as well as by eliminating obsolete knowledge to give way to the new one
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