Fact Or Appearance?The Impact Of The Firms’ Green-innovation Heterogeneity On The Firm’s Legitimacy Under The Institutional Pressure

Green innovation is the inevitable choice for firm‘s survival and growth when facing tremendous pressure of institutional environment.Between firms and institutional environment,organizational legitimacy is the key tie.However,it reveals divergent when firms adopt green-innovation choices to achieve their legitimacy.The academic research on green innovation focuses on its motivation,and few literatures study the consequences of the behavioral difference of green innovation on enterprises from the perspective of institutional theory.From organizational legitimacy perspective,we will figure out three problems:(1)what are the effects of green innovation heterogeneity on media/investor legitimacy;(2)what‘s the moderating role of environmental regulation intensity between the main effects.This paper collected 251 Chinese manufacturing listed firms as sample,and built the empirical model to test the hypothesis.The results demonstrated that: the green innovation heterogeneity has an inverted U-shaped relationship with media legitimacy,but the green innovation heterogeneity impacts negatively the investor legitimacy.Environmental regulation intensity strengthens the relationship of green innovation heterogeneity on the media legitimacy,but it weakens the negative impact of green innovation heterogeneity on the investor legitimacy.This study provides empirically the crucial theoretical and managerial implications.On the one hand,the extensive insights for green-innovation types will contribute to fulling the independent and interdisciplinary theories of green-innovation and organizational legitimacy.On the other hand,this study also offers the managerial implications for managers and policy makers.