Relationship Between Environmental Attention,Environmental Responsibility And Firm Performance:an Empirical Study Of Second-generation Succession In Family Firms

The environmental governance concept of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China has provided a roadmap for China’s green development and ecological civilization construction.Since the reform and opening up,China’s private economy has flourished for more than 40 years.The founders of the first generation of family businesses have been approaching the end of their careers.The second generation of enterprises have begun to participate in the management of business affairs.China’s family businesses have entered the peak of inheritance.When the family business has completed its inheritance,the second generation,as the new strategic leader of the family business,will influence and even lead the major strategic decisions of the business,making the management of the family business enter a new stage.Faced with increasingly severe environmental pollution problems and pressure from policies and systems,traditional strategies have restricted the development of enterprises.The national green development strategy points out a new direction for the implementation of the family business strategy,and the implementation of the family business green social responsibility strategy also affects the social governance pattern in China in turn.The second generation has its unique cognition and responsibility when facing the green development of enterprises.Its cognition and values will influence the work focus and focus of the senior management team,thus bringing environmental issues into a higher priority position in the strategic plan.Responding to institutional pressure,solving environmental problems and achieving green development has become an urgent need for the transformation of Chinese family businesses.It is the key for policy makers to formulate relevant policies and guide the green development of China’s economy to study how to encourage family businesses to actively fulfill their environmental responsibilities and practice green production methods.Based on the basic concept of attention,the theory of social emotional wealth,the theory of high-level echelon,and the system of institutional theory,this study starts from the environmental responsibility of enterprises,takes the second generation of A-share family listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges as the research sample,and selects the annual report data and social responsibility report from 2001 to 2017 to form 216 unbalanced panel data with 734 observations to discuss environmental attention,environmental responsibility The relationship between the three aspects of corporate performance,explore the regulatory role of institutional environment,family shareholding ratio on environmental responsibility.The research shows that the environmental attention of the second generation of the family after taking over has a positive impact on the performance of environmental responsibility;Environmental attention negatively affects market performance and positively affects financial performance;Family shareholding ratio and institutional environment positively regulate the impact of environmental attention on corporate environmental responsibility;The theoretical contributions of this research: First,based on the basic concept of attention,from the perspective of the second generation cognitive structure and institutional environment,the research shows that the family business after succession has a stronger social responsibility orientation.Second,it demonstrates the impact of family holding on the relationship between executives’ environmental attention and corporate environmental responsibility.It provides a second interpretation perspective besides agency theory to reveal the impact of family holding on family corporate social responsibility behavior.Thirdly,from the perspective of institutional environment,this paper discusses the impact of institutional environment on the process of family business succession leaders’ fulfilling environmental responsibilities and producing business performance.Once again,it verifies the institutionalism view that corporate social responsibility is helping enterprises to obtain legitimacy,leverage social resources and form their own competitive advantages.