Performance Expectation Gap And "Greenwashing" Behavior

Under the background of the new era,China increasingly emphasizes the importance of ecological civilization.Whether enterprises shoulder the burden of environmental protection has an important impact on the process of ecological civilization construction.As the main body of environmental pollution,enterprises need to take responsibility of the environmental protection.However,the phenomenon of "greenwashing" is more frequent during the period of declining performance.The "greenwashing" behavior is specifically reflected in the fact that they only disclose positive information in their environmental reports,deliberately concealing their environmental violations,or their environmental reports contain more qualitative information than quantitative data,which makes it difficult to verify the authenticity of the data.The research is useful for investors to identify the "greenwashing" enterprises and for the regulatory authorities to clarify the supervision objects.This thesis uses case analysis method and takes HBIS Limited Company as the research object.The thesis analyses performance expectation gap of HBIS,uses "greenwashing" evaluation system,studies annual report and social responsibility report and quantitatively measured the degree of "greenwashing".It also studies the influence mechanism of performance gap on "greenwashing".The findings are as follows:(1)Performance expectation gap will aggravate the degree of "greenwashing".The selective disclosure means of HBIS include intentionally concealing environmental violations in environmental reports,and the symbolic disclosure means include the lack of quantitative data,which makes it difficult for information users to discern the authenticity of information.(2)When the performance expectation gap is large,the management is eager to improve the current performance,so it reduces the investment of environmental treatment,reduces the burden of environmental protection tax by artificially adjusting monitoring data,and fails to implement the requirements of illegal production during the emergency response period of heavy pollution weather to increase corporate earnings.(3)The media and the refinement of the Administrative Procedures of Environmental Information Disclosure have prompted the enterprise to reduce the "greenwashing" behavior.Therefore,in order to reduce the occurrence of "greenwashing" behavior of enterprises and help the sustainable development of enterprises and society,enterprises should be supervised from the government,media,third-party environmental audit and internal capacity building of enterprises.This paper enriches the research on the influence of performance expectation gap on the "greenwashing" behavior of heavy polluting enterprises,and also provides practical cases for the identification of enterprise "greenwashing" situation and means.