The Influence Of Proactive Environmental Strategy On Corporate Sustainable Competitive Advantage

With the rapid industrial development,environmental pollution has grown exponentially to be a global problem,and ?green? has become a worldwide expectation.Environmental management has been a hot spot of study among theoretical field and management field.With limited rational cognition,enterprises used to act under the logic that ?environmental behavior-cost rises-competitiveness weaken?,and did not willing to proceed environmental management at the cost of short-term economic benefits.The long-term advantage,which means sustainable competitive advantage that environmental behavior such as enterprise pollution prevention,clean production,wastes cyclic,green product innovations could bring to has been ignored.Nowadays,under the background of excessive resource consumption and serious environmental pollution,enterprises should strategically focus on the relationship with environment,only by taking a positive attitude towards the challenge of complicated environmental problems and regarding them as ?opportunities? rather than ?threats?,if they want to maintain competitive advantages and become long-term development company.However,the problem that how to turn ?green? into an competitive advantage,how to develop and implement environmental strategies more effectively so as to be closer to the goal of green development,how to tap green growth potentials and build sustainable competitiveness,how to make environmental strategy and green resource capability well matched with each other so as to gain sustainable competitiveness put forward new challenges to strategic theory researchers and practitioners.The academic research on corporate environmental strategy begins earlier,although the theory fields has reached a consensus that there is a positive relation between enterprise environmental strategy and enterprise competitive advantage,however,there are still some limitations in the existing research.First,the research explained ?why? enterprises should implement proactive environmental strategy,none of the existing studies fundamentally solved the problem of ?how? to effectively carry out proactive environmental strategy and establish competitive advantage,which has remained the emphasis and difficulty of enterprise environmental strategy study,ignored the vital role of green intelligence capital.Second,even though abundant academic studies have made research into green innovation,few of them has paid attention to the relationship between green intelligence capital and green innovation,especially there is still a gap in the dimensional comparative study on green intelligence capital and green innovation,and the vital role them in implementation of proactive environmental strategy.It shall not give specific and effective suggestions for enterprises‘ management of strategic environmental activities.In addition,there are no available literatures can explain the existing research contradictions.Such as the same environmental strategy taken in different organization environment will produce different effects;differences in environmental management practice will have different influences on enterprises;intelligence capital does not always necessarily have a positive influence on organizations and its influences on green innovation also various from changing interior environment.This research situation is mainly due to the reason that current studies ignored some of the boundary conditions in the influences that proactive environmental strategy has on enterprises,and tried to explain proactive environmental strategy‘s influences on enterprises without mentioning stakeholder,leadership or dynamic capacity factors,which makes it difficult to reach a consistency in research conclusion.Aimed at above research problems,this paper focuses on contradictory reviews and practical difficulties in academic studies,and makes an intensive research into environmental strategy from the perspectives of natural-resource-based view theory,intelligence capital theory and dynamic capacity theory,so as to explore the influence mechanism of proactive environmental strategy to enterprise competitive advantage and verify the mediation effect of green intelligence capital and green innovation.This study also sets up a chain mediation model and tests different chain effects by comparison.On this basis,the moderation effect in the process of proactive environmental strategy‘s influence on enterprise competitive advantage will be identified and the mediation effect of stakeholder environmental pressure,environmental leadership and green dynamic capacity will be proved,which will make the boundary conditions of influence mechanism clearer.Based on empirical studies,this paper arrives at the following conclusions: First,proactive environmental strategy has an obvious positive effect on enterprise sustainable competitive advantage,and an enterprise‘s implementation of proactive environmental strategy is conductive to its accumulation of green intelligence capital and promotion of green innovation,which consequently helps the enterprise to establish sustainable competitive advantage.Second,by comparing different chain mediation effects,this study discovers that the chain mediation effects of green human capital and green structural innovation are among the strongest,while the chain mediation effects of green structural capital and green innovation are not obvious.Third,when the stakeholder environmental pressure is comparatively strong,it is easier for the enterprise to gain more green structural capital and green relational capital by implementing proactive environmental strategy,but the influence on green human capital is small.Higher environmental leadership in an enterprise better promotes the enterprise‘s green innovation utilizing green intelligence capital.Stronger green dynamic capacity will result in stronger effects of green human capital and green relational capital on green innovation,hence proactive environmental strategy behavior will further promote enterprise‘s establishment of sustainable competitive advantage.Last but not least,this paper finds through the verification of mediation effect and dual moderation effects that with stronger green dynamic capacity,stakeholder environmental pressure strengthens the indirect influences of proactive environmental strategy on enterprise sustainable competitive advantage,and the influences are exercised by means of green human capital,green structural capital and green relational capital;When environmental leadership and green dynamic capacity are comparatively stronger,three types of capital will have stronger indirect influences on enterprise sustainable competitive advantage through green product innovation and green process innovation.However,when environmental leadership is comparatively weak,green structural capital‘s indirect influence on enterprise sustainable competitive advantage through green innovation will not be prominent,regardless of green dynamic capacity.In conclusion,this paper not only makes up the limitation in previous studies concerning environmental strategy and enterprise competitive advantage,but also establishes a new research framework of ?strategy-intelligence capital-green innovation-sustainable competitiveness? in the environment management field based on the classical research paradigm of ?process-resources-advantage? in the strategic management field.It dives deep into the chain mediation effect of green intelligence capital and green innovation in this transmission mechanism.It opens the ?black box? between proactive environmental strategy and sustainable competitive advantage,and solves the problem of how to turn ?green? into a source for enterprises‘ sustainable competitive advantage campaign.This study not only involves effective environmental management suggestions for enterprises to conduct environmental strategy more successfully,but also provides important theoretical and practical guidance for Chinese enterprises to achieve a win-win situation among economic performance,environmental performance and social performance,as well as realize green development and sustainable development.