The Influence Of Corporate Environmental Responsibility On Corporate Sustainable Development

On September 22,2020,General Secretary Xi Jinping announced at the United Nations that “China will increase the contribution of national funding,adopt more effective policies and measures,and strive to reach the peak of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030,and strive to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060".This shows that a substantial reduction in carbon intensity in the next few decades will become the core goal of China as a whole,and this climate ambition is of great value to the comprehensive green transformation.As the main carrier of the comprehensive green transformation in the ecological environment,the enterprise is the charge to promote the "comprehensive green transformation" in the field of ecological environmental protection.The core is to actively reduce the climate and environmental risks through effective response to environmental changes and integrate effective ecological environmental protection measures.And then protect the foundation of the ecological environment that maintains the development of productivity.In previous studies,although scholars have formed some basic cognitions on the environmental management strategies of enterprises,such as environmental investment will affect the production costs,and then have an impact on the economic benefits;For enterprises and natural environment,proactive environmental behaviors usually bring more positive effects than passive environmental behaviors.But nowadays,as the country and the public continue to pay attention to environmental issues,as well as the continuous transformation of business and profit structures in a dynamic competitive market,investment in the environment has long been not at the expense of economic interests,but may bring a great competitive advantage for enterprises in terms of economy.Moreover,in the process of implementing environmental strategies,companies do not need to blindly look for more active environmental strategies to deal with environmental issues.Taking into account China’s organizational context and the development status of China’s manufacturing enterprises,finding the right type of strategy is the key to sustainable development.Therefore,how can companies correctly understand and balance the economic goals,social goals,and environmental goals,and find a suitable environmental governance development path has become a topic that academia and industry need to think together in the future.It can be found that the existing research has carried out theoretical deduction and empirical tests on the driving factors and result factors of corporate environmental responsibility,but there are still some deficiencies.First of all,existing research has explored the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and corporate performance,especially corporate economic performance,and tried to explore why companies should assume environmental responsibility and whether corporate environmental responsibility can bring better economic benefits.However,existing researches ignore that the performance of corporate environmental responsibility is not a strategic decision made at a certain point in time,and its effect is not only reflected in the performance level of the company in a certain year or several years.And it also ignores the long-term and persistence of corporate environmental responsibility.Secondly,the academic has richer researches on corporate environmental strategy and green innovation,and has conducted richer verifications on the antecedent variables and outcome variables of these two variables.But few studies divide them into different dimensions and compare the influence coefficients between them.In fact,both corporate environmental strategy and green innovation are diversified concepts.The concept itself covers a very wide range.Researching and verifying it as a single variable will inevitably encounter general problems.There is no way to thoroughly clarify the importance of corporate environmental strategy and green innovation for the sustainable development of the company.Finally,existing studies tend to favor corporate performance in the selection of outcome variables,and seldom mention concepts such as corporate sustainable development.The reason is that the concept of corporate sustainable development focuses on the ultimate goal that the company wants to achieve through production and operation,and it is difficult to quantify it.Therefore,this research chooses the variable of corporate sustainability to measure whether the company can achieve sustainable development in the future.Compared with sustainable development,the concept of sustainability focuses more on the company’s goal of achieving sustainable development.All the efforts made in this goal have also quantified the concept of sustainable development.For the vast majority of Chinese manufacturing companies,attention to and governance of the ecological environment will be an important topic that accompanies the entire life cycle of the company.If companies want to maintain their own competitive advantages for a long time,they must improve their own sustainability.And environmental governance are not independent corporate tasks that depend on individual policies or individual strategic decisions,they should be an important part of the core corporate goals.In order to make up for the research deficiencies explained in the previous article,this research uses the natural resource-based view as the theoretical basis,constructs the basic theoretical framework of "corporate environmental responsibility-corporate environmental strategy-green innovation-corporate sustainability".And based on the stakeholder theory,stakeholder integration is introduced as a moderating variable in the basic framework.Not only that,in order to deeply study the mechanism of corporate environmental responsibility and corporate sustainability,and to resolve the cognitive biases and practical contradictions that exist in the process of corporate environmental governance,this study applies the paradox theory to the sustainable development of companies.The paradox view of corporate sustainable development clearly shows that there are tensions between different sustainability goals.Although these goals seem to conflict with each other,they are also interdependent.By accepting and recognizing this tension,the paradox perspective enables decision-makers to achieve mutually competing sustainable development goals at the same time.The paradox perspective creates room for companies to make outstanding contributions to sustainable development,because it regards environmental and social issues as part of the company’s purpose,not just a means to maximize profits.After applying the three basic paradoxes of paradox theory,the paradox of belonging,the paradox of learning and the paradox of performance to the research in the field of corporate sustainable development,this research puts forward three paradoxes faced by companies in the environmental field:(1)There is an intertemporal decision-making paradox between companies choosing to be loyal to the economic interests of shareholders or undertaking social and environmental responsibilities.Enterprises need to balance and trade-off between pursuing economic benefits and assuming social and environmental responsibilities;(2)There is a cost decision paradox between the choice of solid reforms and the updating of the entire industrial structure.Companies need to balance and trade-off between pursuing stable changes,responding to environmental changes,and actively carrying out comprehensive changes;(3)There is a paradox in choice and decision-making between the importance of the three dimensions of sustainability.In the three dimensions of economic sustainability,social sustainability and environmental sustainability,companies do not have to unconditionally place economic sustainability at the core.Social sustainability and environmental sustainability are also important indicators worthy of corporate pursuit.This study takes more than 200 companies mainly located in the Yangtze River Delta,the Pearl River Delta and the Northeast as the research objects.Through questionnaire surveys and multiple regression analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)Corporate environmental responsibility has a significant positive impact on corporate sustainability.Corporate environmental strategy and green innovation can play an intermediary role between corporate environmental responsibility and corporate sustainability,and jointly play a chain mediations role between corporate environmental responsibility and corporate sustainability;(2)When examining the main effects and intermediary effects of various dimensions,this study found that the impact of corporate environmental responsibility on social sustainability is not significant.The mediating effect of green product innovation and green process innovation on corporate social sustainability is not significant,which also leads to the conclusion that the mediating effect of reactive environmental strategy,green product innovation and green process innovation between corporate environmental responsibility and social sustainability is not significant.In addition,corporate environmental responsibility has a significant positive impact on economic sustainability and environmental sustainability.Reactive environmental strategies,proactive environmental strategies,and green process innovation can play a significant intermediary role between corporate environmental responsibility and the economic,social and environmental sustainability.And green product innovation can still play a significant intermediary role between corporate environmental responsibility and economic sustainability and environmental sustainability.When testing the chain intermediary role,in addition to the chain intermediary role of reactive environmental strategy and green product innovation,green process innovation between corporate environmental responsibility and social sustainability is not established,the chain between other variable dimensions has been proved to be positive and significant;(3)When analyzing the intermediary coefficients of intermediary variables in different dimensions,this study found that in the intermediary relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and economic sustainability,the intermediary effect coefficient of the reactive environmental strategy is greater than that of the proactive environmental strategy.Green product innovation has a greater mediating effect coefficient than green process innovation;In the mediating relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and social sustainability,proactive environmental strategies have a greater mediating effect coefficient than reactive environmental strategies.In the mediating relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and environmental sustainability,proactive environmental strategies have a greater mediating effect coefficient than reactive environmental strategies,and green process innovation has a greater mediating effect coefficient than green product innovation;(4)When analyzing the moderating effect,this study concluded that stakeholder integration can play a positive role in regulating the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and corporate sustainability,as well as corporate environmental responsibility and corporate environmental strategy.The positive adjustment effect of the dimension has been verified to be established;(5)The relationship among three dimensions of corporate sustainability,economic sustainability,social sustainability and environmental sustainability are all positive,indicating that the three dimensions can promote each other.In summary,on the one hand,this article builds a basic theoretical framework with corporate environmental responsibility,corporate environmental strategy,green innovation,corporate sustainability,and stakeholder integration which based on natural resource-based view and stakeholder theory.In addition,the paradox theory is introduced into the research field of corporate sustainable development.Based on the basic paradox paradigm of the paradox theory,the three paradoxes worthy of attention in the field of environmental management are summarized,and further expanded the research content.On the other hand,this research divides the variables into dimensions,not only analyzes the individual impact of each dimension,but also compares the dimensional influence coefficients of different variables,providing ideas for companies to find the best path to environmental problems.On the basis of existing research,the field of research on corporate environmental responsibility and corporate sustainability has been broadened,and the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and corporate sustainability has been analyzed and discussed in detail.The change of thinking mode in the face of environmental problems has certain guiding significance,helping companies to understand more comprehensively and dialectically how companies should achieve their own "green".