EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Does intrinsic motivation or extrinsic pressure matter more? An exploratory study of small businesses going green and innovation

Bach Nguyen and Nhung Vu

Business Strategy and the Environment, 2024, vol. 33, issue 5, 3855-3886

Abstract: Small firms may go green because of intrinsic motivation (to realise their green values) or extrinsic pressure (to satisfy the requirements of stakeholders). While the impacts of these two motivations on firms' green behaviours have been discussed in the literature, their influences on economic behaviours such as innovation remain unclear. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between going green due to intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations and their impact on firms' innovation. We examine a dataset of almost 21,000 small businesses in 39 countries, primarily less developed, from 2018 to 2020. We find that firms going green tend to be more innovative than those that do not. Also, firms going green due to extrinsic pressure are equally innovative as those that do so for intrinsic motivation. In some cases, it is even found that extrinsic pressure exerts a stronger effect on innovation than intrinsic motivation. Moreover, we examine the moderating effects of market competition on the relationship between green motivation and innovation. We find that while competition exerts no effect on the relationship between intrinsic motivation to go green and firm innovation, it strengthens the relationship between extrinsic motivation to go green and firm innovation. Our findings are robust in different empirical settings that control for endogeneity, model specifications and estimators.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.3676

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:bstrat:v:33:y:2024:i:5:p:3855-3886

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1002/(ISSN)1099-0836

Access Statistics for this article

Business Strategy and the Environment is currently edited by Richard Welford

More articles in Business Strategy and the Environment from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bla:bstrat:v:33:y:2024:i:5:p:3855-3886