The Study On Antecedents And Performance Of Proactive Pollution Reduction Behavior Of Environmental Managers In Manufacturing Firms Underpinned By The Proactive Behavior Theory

There is a growing debate on channels that aim to mitigate global climate change.Prior research argued that the worsening natural environment is largely due to the less climate-friendly operations in manufacturing sectors.In recent years,the expansion of energy consumption and pollutants discharge in China triggers a series of environmental pollution accidents,which leads Chinese government to undertake a great pressure on environmental protection.Prior research has focused on how to reduce environmental pollution from macro and mesoscopic angles.However,the actual production behavior in firms that belongs to the micro angle will directly determine the size of pollutants discharge,and the root of such behavior can be further traced back to the psychological motivation of top managers with a primary responsibility in environmental management(this study names them as environmental managers)to the pollution reduction.By now,it lacks a systematic focus within Chinese and international research.Accordingly,this study will construct the research framework underpinned by the proactive behavior theory and target at shortcomings in the field of corporate environmental management,aiming to analyze the antecedents as well as performance of environmental managers' proactive pollution reduction behavior(PPRB).This study surveys top environmental managers with the supreme decision-making power in environmental issues in Chinese manufacturing firms.Through constructing a mediated moderation model,this study will progressively address following questions:(1)Whether environmental managers' psychological motivation will help to improve their PPRB?(2)How corporate internal and external contextual factors,i.e.available resources in firms and incentives from external stakeholders,will moderate the impact of environmental managers' motivation on their PPRB?(3)How PPRB affect corporate performance?(4)Based on the identification of general features of proactive behavior,this study will further examine the impact of psychological motivation and contextual factors on different features of PPRBs.As for the specific psychological motivation,based on the connotation of common psychological motivations within the proactive behavior theory and individual psychological states implied by proacitve environmental management behavior in firms,this study identifies that environmental managers' role breadth self-efficacy(it is divided into in-role self-efficacy and extra-role self-efficacy)and felt responsibility(it is divided into felt responsibility establishment and felt responsibility coordination)may lead to the level of their PPRB,thereby examining the driving effect of these motivations.To address above questions,this study firstly collects 2112 papers whose theme is on the proactive behavior in organizations published from 1934 to 2017 as the sample to present the core literature network in this field through the Co-citation Analysis Method.Through identifying the important literature,this study establishes the general analytical framework of proactive behavior that involves the critical antecedents of this behavior,behavioral features,and behavioral performance,thereby viewing them as a theoretical ground for hypotheses construction of this study.As for the general feature of proactive behavior,this study identifies that this behavior will progressively present self-starting,transformative,and prospective features during the development of things according to the description of common outward manifestations of this behavior in prior research.Based on theoretical analysis,this study preliminarily validates the applicability of analytical framework of proactive behavior in pollution reduction issues through the exploratory case study.The descriptive statistics of data from large-sample firms present that compared with environmental managers' psychological motivation,the level of their PPRB is quite lower,which implies that their motivations have not fully evolved into the actual proactive behavior.Empirical results indicate that both role breadth self-efficacy and felt responsibility significantly improve PPRB,while internal available resources only significantly positively moderate the impact of extra-role self-efficacy on PPRB,and incentives from external stakeholders only significantly positively moderate the impact of felt responsibility establishment on PPRB.These findings can support that compared with contextual factors,environmental managers' motivation exerts a stronger driving force for improving their PPRB.Further,PPRB significantly improves corporate operational performance,strategic competitiveness,and environmental performance,but thigher performance requires more driving effects from behavioral antecedents.Further,this study separately examines the impact of psychological motivation and contextual factors on self-starting,transformative,and prospective pollution reduction behaviors.Results present that compared with transformative and prospective pollution reduction behaviors,psychological motivation better improve the self-starting behavior.As for contextual factors,only incentives from external stakeholders can significantly positively moderate the impact of some motivations on self-starting and transformative pollution reduction behaviors.Accordingly,compared with engaging in the short-term pollution reduction task,focusing on pollution reduction behaviors with strategic feature raises higher requirements for levels of psychological motivation and contextual factors.Overall,in Chinese manufacturing firms,although the psychological motivation of environmental managers for pollution reduction issues can help to improve their PPRB,such motivation has not reached a higher level.Additionally,critical contextual factors have not well promoted the transformation from psychological motivation to PPRB.For improving this case,this study will analyze how to improve the level of environmental managers' PPRB from angles of their psychological motivation,available resources in firms,external incentives,and corporate ownership property based on contents covered by measuring items this study designs.The main innovations of this study are as follows.First,it expands the investigated scope of antecedents of environmental management behaviors in firms,with analyzing why environmental managers can proactively engage in activities that help to protect the natural environment from the angle of their own psychological motivation.Additionally,this study sets critical contextual factor as a moderating variable between psychological motivation and PPRB,which will help to fairly evaluate the value of contextual factors in environmental management.Second,this study systematically applies the proactive behavior theory in the field of corporate environmental management,and accordingly identifies psychological motivations that may largely affect the level of environmental managers' PPRB,which can help to enrich the guiding theory in this field.Specifically,it is reflected in that research hypotheses of this study involve individual psychology,contextual factors,behavioral manifestation,and behavioral performance.Accordingly,this study analyzes how the initial motivation evolves into the final pollution reduction performance.Third,based on the description as for common outward manifestations of proactive behavior in prior research,this study summarizes the general feature of this behavior as self-starting,transformative,and prospective,thereby separately examining the impact of psychological motivations and contextual factors on these three kinds of pollution reduction behaviors.This design helps Chinese manufacturing firms to better understand differential requirements of pollution reduction activities at different stages to its antecedents,thus they can target at developing supportive plans.