Corporate Environmental Responsibility, Stakeholder-driven Response And Performance Studies

The environmental issue has been very much concerned in the contemporary society. With the continuously rising awareness of environmental protection and increasingly complex and stringent environmental legislations and regulations, corporates are now facing serious environmental challenges and, actively or passively, placing environmental issues to a more important position in both strategy-designing and decision-making.In China, with the implementation of the strategy of sustainable development, especially the proposal of the idea of people-oriented, comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable scientific concept of development, it fully demonstrates the Chinese government's high degree of attention on harmonious development between social and economy. However, many corporates seriously lack social responsibility, especially environmental responsibility. This is clearly incompatible with the policy of building a harmonious society and the strategy of sustainable development. As China is undergoing a transformation between environmental protection and economic development and social relations, how corporates win more social recognition and favorable social impact, and then win competitive advantage by their resources investment in environmental responsibility, has becoming a common important issues with which theory research, business and government departments to face.Past research on corporate environmental responsibility has viewed environmental management as a narrowly defined corporate legal function, primarily concerned with the interaction between government environmental legislation and corporate environmental behavior, such as environmental strategy and environmental technological innovation. However, each corporate is a nexus of relationship among stakeholders and operating in a complex integrative social contract. Today, various signs show that corporates are facing with pressures from pluralistic stakeholders: government, consumers, investors, news media and local communities, and so on. In the face of various stakeholder groups with competing claims, corporate environmental management is not just simply defined as a legal function or a compliance with the government regulations, but through the the allocation of scarce resources to balance the different and conflicting priorities among stakeholders and to response appropriately to claims and pressures from different stakeholders.Regarding this background, not from a single perspective of government environmental regulation, but from the perspective of multiple stakeholders, this research establishes a P-R-P integrative analysis model of Stakeholders Pressures-Organization Responsiveness-Environmental Performance. The main contents of this dissertation are organised into following eight chapters.Chapter1, introduction. This chapter discusses the background and theoretical and practical values of the research. The structure and main contents of the dissertation are proposed, followed by the research objectives and methodology. Some innovative contributions of the work are presented towards the end of the section.Chapter2, literature review. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the research that has been undertaken in the areas of the relations between organization and environment, three main questions about the research of corporate environmental responsibility, and the stakeholder theory. Then the shortages in existing literature are pointed out for future discussion.Chapter3, Chapter4, and Chapter5are theoretical analyses for P-R-P integrate model. First, chapter3focuses on the pressure level. Who are these stakeholders in the external environment which are exerting impacts on the corporate environmental responsibility? Facing with those stakeholders of different objectives and expectations, how managers evaluate the perceived importance of different stakeholder? What are the factors influence the managers'perception and cognition on these stakeholders? Second, chapter4foucuses on the response level. This part will explore the relationship between the level of proactiveness of environmental responsive strategies and the importance attached to stakeholders. What are the factors influence the degree of environmental responsive practices? Third, chapter5foucuses on the performance level. How to establish a rational evaluative system for the environmental performance? The more proactive response to business environment, the better is its environmental performance? what's the essential mechanisms between proactive corporate environmental initiatives and its competitive advantage?Chapter6and Chapter7are empirical testing for the hypotheses proposed in chapter3,4,5based on theoretical analyses. In this study, questionnaire was used as empirical research instrument during the data collecting. In the data processing procedure, I mainly used correlation analysis, ANOVA, Paired-samples T test, confirmatory factor analysis, multiple regression analysis, and structural equation modeling(SEM) to verify hypotheses in the model by using the software of SPSS15.0and LISREL8.70.Chapter8, conclusions and research prospects. This final section contains the insights and implications of the research results, and the areas for further research.A number of innovative contributions in the dissertation can be summarised as follows:1. Established an integrative analysising framework of stakeholder pressures and corporate environmental responsiveness and environmental performance.2. Revealed the social contract basis of corpotate environmental responsibility and the factors how managers evaluate the importance of different stakeholders. There can be differences among stakeholders when dealing with a specific environmental issue. Due to various reasons, not all stakeholders are equally important for corporations when crafting environmental strategies, that is, it will be different in the extent to which stakeholders affect or be affected by the achievement of the corporate's environmental objectives. Therefore, manager's awareness and perception of the importance of stakeholders will be various. In general, the most important pressure source is government regulation, then are financial institute and customers, and the most unimportant drivers are from media, communities and ENGO. Stakeholders will be evaluated differently, which depends on the stakeholder's environmental attributes of power, legitimacy and urgency. A stakeholder's environmental salience is positively related to the cumulative number of stakeholder environmental attributes and its environmental attributes. 3. Established an overall environmental performance index and revealed the linkage between corporate environmental responsibility and competitive advantage. The empirical test shows that there is a positive relationship between the level of proactiveness of environmental strategies and the importance attached to stakeholders. Among all organization attributes, organization scale has a positive influence on the level of proactiveness of environmental strategies. The results also show that the more proactive response to environmental responsibility, the better the explicit and implicit environmental performance. More importantly, active, proactive respond to environmental issue through such as pollution prevention, product management or sustainable development approach, will help accumulate valuable resources and capabilities. The more obvious features of these valuable resources and capabilities, the more likely for corporate to hold a sustainable competitive advantage4. Empirically tested the stakeholder pressure and corporate environmental responsiveness and environmental performance by multiple analysis methods.