Influencing Factors Of The Ecological Environment Management In Multinational Companies

Globalization has caused increasing theoretical attention about firm-level ecological sustainable development. Multinational companies(MNCs)are known to have made positive contributions in economic efficiency and serves as a conduit for giobalization of economies. However, MNCs' questions have been raised concerning social and environmental performance because of their economic power and ability to shift resources and production across borders. Existing academic and practitioner literatures have come to contradictory conclusions, making it still unclear what motivates their green behaviors in host countries. Environment management has imposed a unique challenge to MNCs leveraging global integration and national responsiveness, the environment management in developing host countries has been heightened by practitioners and academics. With the evolving of present research of global strategy from headquarters perspective toward a subsidiaries positioning, environment performance of subsidiaries have attracted great concern, the purpose of this study is to identify determinants of MNCs' environment strategy in developing countries. The overall strategy of constructing the resource-economization and environmental friendly society would require MNCs in China to develop environmental policies consistent with host countries' sustainable development. Under the transition period of environment regulation and enhanced public ecological awareness, which are the characters of MNCs' environment practices in China? What the extent of environment policies' integration and localization? What determines their environmental management in host country? This dissertation examines various dimensions constituting environment management and explores driving forces of corporate environmental behaviors, aiming to effectively predict MNCs' environmental practices and mechanisms forming green organizations.Building upon recent literatures, this study provides a theoretical framework of determinants of MNC's environmental management proactivity and standardization, analyzing the influences of competition, legitimacy, ecological responsibility and resources. The moderating effects of a variety of firm specific as well as contextual factors are also examined, including environmental regulation, multinational ownerships, and ISO14001 certification. The empirical analysis is carried out by using data collected through questionnaire survey of 105 multinational companies located in China. Structure equation model and multiple regression analysis are used to test the hypotheses. Results indicate that competition and legitimacy are two underlying factors positively influence MNCs' environment proactivity, resources and competition jointly exert significant full mediating effect on ecological responsibility. Ecological responsibility is also partly mediated by competition and legitimacy. In environment policy standardization model, competition and resources positively influence MNCs' environment policy standardization, resources has a full mediation effect on legitimacy as well as ecological responsibility. This implies that although legitimacy and ecological responsibility have no statistically significant direct influence, a positive impact achieves through the mediation of resources. Environment regulation shows no significant moderating effect except a positive impact on resources. Multinational ownership moderates the relationship between ecological responsibility and environment policy standardization. ISO14001 certification negatively moderates the effect of competition and legitimacy on environment proactivity.The primary contribution in this study is to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework from subsidiaries' perspectives, consisting of main effects of competition, legitimacy, ecological responsibility resources, and several moderating factors. By integrating environmental management, institutional theory, resource-based view, corporate social responsibility, as well as global management literatures, this study offers valuable insights into explanation of MNCs' environment management in developing host countries, providing an extending to existing environment theory. The driving forces of MNCs' environment performance in host country and the extent of environment policy standardization are explained respectively, the two independent models may complement each other which may further increase the strength. Beyond the theoretical configuration, structural equation modeling was employed to test the relationships proposed and an empirical approach was developed to measure various dimensions of environment performance and the determinant factors, which also account for the contributions.This study is subject to several limitations. First, due to the unavailability of an objective measure of firms' environment performance in China, the analyses are relying on self-report data, which may raise concerns of common variance method. Though an assurance of anonymity may reduce such variance, we cannot completely rule out the concern of inflated responses on socially desirable questions, this may result in restricts of the findings. By triangulating multiple sources of information, researchers can achieve more confidence of the findings. Second, owing to the difficulty of collecting data, and the participated survey includes only primarily large companies operating in Shanghai, the nature of the present sample makes it difficult to generalize the findings.In spite of these limitations, the results highlight several fruitful avenues for future exploration. Since our study focuses on one Chinese city, the present research setting should be extended to investigate other region to see whether the relationships exist. The implication for policy-maker is that MNCs may act as catalysts in promoting proactive environment practices by assisting regulatory agencies on environmental protection and upgrading the capacities of domestic firms to meet tightening environmental standards. It is necessary for environment institutions to provide mechanisms facilitating green competitive advantages, in order to stimulus environmental self-regulation and standardization rather than a green-washing. As China places stress on enhancing environmental management during the process of industrializing, all the determinant factors should be systematically taken into account to improve the effectiveness of environment policies enforcement.