Firm's Energy-saving Behavior:A Study Based On TOE Framework

Energy is an important factor of production and resource for subsistence.The rapid development of energy consumption not only leads to energy crisis,but also causes many environmental problems.Saving energy and improving energy efficiency are important ways for China to deal with such severe situations.Companies,especially those with high energy consumption,are key sectors of energy consumption.Government has made many related policies to promote these firms' energy-saving behavior,and furthermore improve their energy efficiency.However,there are still a crowd of companies that haven't achieved their energy-saving goals due to their unwillingness to conserve energy.Besides,some barriers also hinder the implementation of energy-saving measures.Thus,how to deal with these barriers and furthermore promote firm's energy-saving behavior is a crucial issue.Current energy-saving research mostly focused on organizational and environmental factors and ignored the effects of technological factors on firm's energy-saving behavior.We believe such technological factors as relative advantage and cost are important that we should not ignore.To fill this gap,based on TOE(Technology-Organization-Environment)framework,institutional theory and diffusion of innovation theory,we build an integrated model considering technological,organizational and environmental factors to explore their roles in firm's energy-saving behavior.The model was empirically examined using survey data collected from companies.Method of Partial Least Squares(PLS)was used to analyze the data.Results show that relative advantage,top management support,incentive instrument and normative pressure are significantly and positively related to firm's energy-saving behavior,while cost has a significantly negative effect on firm's energy-saving behavior.Results also show that compatibility,complexity,financial slack,command-and-control instrument and mimetic pressure do not have significant influences on firm's energy-saving behavior.Our research provides some possible explanations according to prior literature and practical condition.Based on the empirical results,implications and suggestions on how to promote firm's energy-saving behavior are discussed.