A Study Of CEO Regulation Focus On Corporate Greenwashing Behavior

When the society strongly advocates green management of enterprises,it is still common for enterprises to go green all over the world.The enterprise’s green drift behavior may help the enterprise gain more customer trust before it is exposed,and once it is exposed,it will have a huge impact on the enterprise itself and stakeholders.As a strategic behavior of the company,the driving factors of green enterprise have attracted extensive attention from the academic community.The research shows that external factors such as legitimacy pressure and market environment are the factors that cause enterprises to drift green,but few scholars pay attention to the factors that affect enterprises at the micro level such as CEO personality traits.However,according to the classic Upper Echelons Theory,factors at the individual level are also extremely important for enterprises.In order to try to fill this gap,based on the theory of resource conservation and the theory of regulatory focus,this study examines the antecedents of corporate green drift behavior from the individual level of corporate executives,and deeply explores the impact mechanism of CEO regulatory focus on corporate green drift.Based on the panel data of 88 Chinese enterprises in the ASSET4 database from 2010 to 2015,this study examined the different effects of CEO regulatory focus(CEO promotion focus and CEO prevention focus)on enterprises’ green drift behavior.When measuring CEO’s adjustment focus,this study uses text analysis technology to analyze the frequency of adjustment focus words in shareholder letters in the annual report.The findings are as follows:(1)There is a U-shaped effect between CEO promotion focus and enterprise green drift behavior;(2)There is a negative relationship between CEO prevention focus and enterprise green drift behavior.In addition,from the perspective of corporate governance mechanism,this paper also examined the regulatory effect,and found that the increase of the proportion of independent directors and the improvement of environmental performance in the executive compensation policy can enhance the main effect,that is,the U-shaped effect of the promotion focus is more significant,and the negative relationship of the prevention focus is more obvious.In addition,since the theory of regulatory focus itself emphasizes that there is no opposition between the promotion focus and the prevention focus,this study also further explored the impact of different combinations of CEO regulatory focus on corporate green drift under the four classifications.Using polynomial regression and response surface analysis,we found that high promotion and low prevention CEOs and low promotion and high prevention CEOs were more likely to engage in green drift behavior.This study has made contributions to the extension of the regulation focus theory and the research framework of the causes of enterprise green drift,and also provides a theoretical reference for enterprise green strategic decision-making.This paper has the following innovative points:(1)This paper focuses on the factors at the micro level of enterprises,and studies the pre-factors that affect the enterprises to engage in green bleaching from the individual and organizational levels,which makes up for the deficiencies of the current green bleaching related literature(2)When exploring the influence of CEO’s personal motivation,that is,the adjustment focus,on the enterprise’s greenish behavior,this paper innovatively further analyzes the different performance behaviors under the four types of CEO who adjust the focus combination(3)At the organizational level,from the perspective of corporate governance mechanism,this paper emphasizes the impact of the composition of the board of directors and the setting of compensation policies on corporate green behavior,which is also of great significance to the study of corporate governance(4)This paper uses text analysis technology to measure CEO’s adjustment focus,and uses polynomial regression and response surface analysis to conduct empirical analysis,which enriches the quantitative research in the field of leadership.