Operations in the upper echelons: leading sustainability through stewardship

The impact of corporate support programs on environmental and social innovation: empirical insights from the food and beverage industry

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of corporate support programs on managers' environmental and social innovation behaviors. To offer a more comprehensive understanding of these relationships, the moderating role of technological reflectiveness and business moral values is also accounted for.

Design/methodology/approach

A scenario-based experimental study to test the impact of corporate support programs on environmental and social innovation behaviors is also adopted. After running a pretest to verify the effectiveness of alternative scenarios through 100 respondents with managerial experience residing in the UK and EU countries, we collected data from a sample of 220 senior managers of firms from the Australian food and beverage industry for the main study. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Dunnett's test to investigate direct relationships and the PROCESS Model to test the moderating role of technological reflectiveness and business moral values were used.

Findings

The findings reveal time provision, budget provision and advice provision as salient forms of corporate support programs that positively impact managers' environmental and social innovation behaviors. It is found that technological reflectiveness positively moderates the link between time provision and managers' social innovation behavior and negatively moderates the link between advice provision and managers' social innovation behavior. Furthermore, it is found that business moral values positively moderate the relationships between time and budget provisions and managers' environmental innovation behavior and between budget and advice provisions and managers' social innovation behavior.

Originality/value

The authors contribute to innovation and operations management research by adopting a behavioral operations management perspective and empirically analyzing the influences of managers' technological reflectiveness and business moral values on the relationship between organizational corporate support programs and managers' environmental and social innovation behavior in the context of the food and beverage industry.

Explicating the microfoundation of SME pro-environmental operations: the role of top managers

Purpose

By recognizing the decisive role of top managers (TMs) of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this study attempts to explicate the microfoundation of pro-environmental operations of SMEs by examining the influence of institutional pressure on managerial cognition and subsequent SME pro-environmental operations. This study highlights the personal ethics of TMs, so as to examine the moderating effect of TMs' place attachment on SMEs' pro-environmental operations.

Design/methodology/approach

Empirical data are collected from a questionnaire survey of 509 SMEs in China. Hierarchical regression results are subject to cross-validation using secondary public data.

Findings

This study demonstrates that coercive and mimetic pressures have inverted U-shaped effects, whilst normative pressure has a U-shaped effect on the threat cognition of TMs. The results also show that TMs' threat cognition (as opposed to opportunity cognition) positively influences SMEs' pro-environmental operations. Moreover, both the emotional (place identity) and functional (place dependence) dimensions of place attachment have positive moderating effects on the relationship between threat cognition and SMEs' pro-environmental operations.

Practical implications

Findings of this study lead to important implications for practitioners such as regulators, policy makers and trade associations. Enabling better understanding of the nature of SMEs' pro-environmental operations, they allow for more targeted development and the provision of optimal institutional tools to promote such operations.

Originality/value

This study allows some important factors that differentiate SMEs from large firms to surface. These factors (i.e. institutional pressures, managerial cognition and place attachment) and the interactions between them form important constituents of the microfoundations of SMEs' pro-environmental operations.