The impact of stakeholders’ influence strategies on environmental performance: a moderated mediation model

Abstract

The present study examines the association between stakeholders’ influence strategies and environmental performance, within a natural-resource-based view framework. Using survey data from a cross-country and cross-industry setting of 170 firms, we tested a moderated mediation model with bootstrapping methods, assessing the mediating role of firms’ proactive environmental strategies and the moderating role of organisational learning capabilities. Results revealed that firms’ proactive environmental strategies acted as a mediator between stakeholders’ influence strategies and environmental performance only when employees’ usage influence strategies was the independent variable. Specifically, proactive environmental strategies mediated the indirect effect when learning capabilities were high but not when they were low. Our findings demonstrate that environmental strategies and learning capabilities are key mechanisms in explaining how employees might advance the corporate greening agenda and ultimately impact firms’ environmental performance