The Impact Of Legitimacy Pressure On Enterprises’ Greenwashing

Greenwashing is a mixture of the words "green" and "whitewash" and refers to the untrue environmental practices of enterprises(Bowen,2014).In other words,it is symbolic messages about the environment within the organization,rather than substantial action.As an enterprise’s green behavior response strategy,greenwashing has become more and more common.However,the research on that in my country is not yet immature,and the research on the motives of it is even more lacking.An urgent task currently facing is how to reduce the enterprise greenwashing and promote the true green transformation of my country’s green economy development model.At the same time,considering that China’s institutional environment background plays an important role in the decision-making of corporate economic behavior,it is more reasonable to use institutional theory and information asymmetry theory to empirically analyze the elements of greenwashing of Chinese companies from the perspective of environmental externalities.Combining reality and theoretical background,this paper intends to investigate the effect of legitimacy pressure on enterprises’ choice of greenwashing,as well as the moderating roles of enterprise environmental visibility and geographical location.In detail,we will figure out three problems:(1)What’s relationship between legitimacy pressure and enterprises’ greenwashing;(2)how geographical location and corporate environmental visibility effect on legitimacy pressure and greenwashing in institutional theory and information asymmetry theory?This paper collected 130 listed firms,and built the empirical model to test the hypothesis.The results demonstrated that: the influence of legal pressure on greenwashing is an inverted "U" shape,while environmental visibility and geographical location weaken the "U" shape of legitimacy pressure on greenwashing.The environmental visibility and geographical location weaken the Inverted-U relationship between legitimacy pressure and greenwashing.This study provides empirically the crucial theoretical and managerial implications.On the one hand,the extensive insights for greenwashing will contribute to fulling the independent and interdisciplinary theories of green behavior,legitimacy and information asymmetry.On the other hand,this study also offers the managerial implications for managers and policy makers,specifically based on the different institutional environment.