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Keywords

technical branding; green innovation; institutional pressure; innovation motivation

Abstract

Green innovation is an important way for enterprises to achieve both economic and environmental benefits. It is of great significance to explore the driving factors of green innovation. As the participants of green technology change, the makers and implementers of green innovation strategy, the senior management team has a profound impact on the direction of green development of enterprises. In the previous literature on executive teams and green innovation, scholars mainly discussed the impact on green innovation from three aspects: demographic characteristics, cognitive factors and past experience based on the higher-order theory. However, although the higherorder theory emphasizes the importance of the executive team, it ignores the motivation and mechanism behind the influence of body on organizational behavior, which is well supplemented by the branding theory. As China enters a new stage of high-quality development, more and more technical talents enter the management, and the characteristics of their technical branding will certainly have an impact on the strategic decision of green innovation in enterprises. At the same time, in the process of implementing green innovation strategy, enterprises may form differentiated green innovation behaviors based on different innovation motives, such as substantive innovation behavior and strategic innovation behavior. Therefore, the main research issue of this paper is to explore the difference of the influence of executive technology branding on green innovation under different innovation motives. In addition, enterprises are deeply embedded in the institutional environment, and internal and external environmental factors jointly affect the innovation behavior of enterprises. Regulatory institutional pressure, normative institutional pressure and imitative institutional pressure are the main institutional factors promoting green innovation. Therefore, the regulatory effect of institutional pressure on the technology branding of senior management teams and green innovation is worthy of further discussion. Based on the branding theory, this paper takes A-share listed companies from 2015 to 2022 as research samples, and empirically studies the relationship between technology branding of senior management teams and corporate green innovation as well as the regulatory role of institutional pressure from the perspective of innovation motivation. It is found that there is a significant positive correlation between technology branding of senior management team and corporate green innovation. When the executive team has a skilled technology brand, it tends to be substantive green innovation; When the executive team has a proven technology brand, it tends to be strategic green innovation. Regulatory pressure, normative pressure and imitation pressure all positively regulate the relationship between technology branding of senior management team and corporate green innovation. Further analysis shows that the promotion effect of technology branding of senior management team on green innovation is more obvious in high-tech enterprises and state-owned enterprises. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, based on branding theory and high-level theory, the influence of technology branding on green innovation of senior management team is investigated, and the influencing factors of corporate green innovation are enriched. Secondly, from the perspective of innovation motivation, the dimension of green innovation is subdivided, and the difference between skill brand and experience brand on substantive and strategic green innovation is discussed. Finally, from the perspective of the new institutional theory, the paper discusses the situational factors of the technology branding of the senior management team and the green innovation of enterprises. Taking institutional pressure as a moderating variable and starting from three perspectives of regulatory, normative and imitative pressure, it is conducive to improving and enriching the boundary conditions of the mechanism of technology branding of senior management team and corporate green innovation.

DOI

10.16315/j.stm.2024.04.006

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