Sustainability or Profitability? How Communicated Motives for Environmental Policy Affect Public Perceptions of Corporate Greenwashing

Gerdien de Vries, Bart W. Terwel, Naomi Ellemers and Dancker D. L. Daamen

Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 2015, vol. 22, issue 3, 142-154

Abstract: Companies in the energy sector face a dilemma regarding how to communicate their environmental policies to the public. Communicating that environmental policies and activities are motivated by concern for the environment could elicit positive reactions, but may also lead to accusations of corporate greenwashing – the idea that companies deliberately frame their activities as ‘green’ in order to look environmentally friendly. The results of three experiments demonstrate that people easily suspect greenwashing when an energy company invests in environmental measures. Importantly, suspicions of corporate greenwashing are reduced by acknowledging economic motives instead of communicating environmental motives for such investments. Suspicion of strategic organizational behavior mediates the effect of communicated motive on perceived corporate greenwashing. This indirect effect occurs primarily among people who are not by nature very skeptical about organizational communications in general. These findings highlight the need to think carefully about how to communicate corporate environmental policies to the public. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/csr.1327

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:wly:corsem:v:22:y:2015:i:3:p:142-154

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().