Pathways towards Green Banking adoption: moderating role of top management commitment

Purpose The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the determinants and outcomes of Green Banking adoption and the moderating influence of top management commitment under the corporate environmental ethics ideology. External stakeholder pressures are analyzed as determinants of Green Banking adoption. Brand image and operational efficiency are examined as outcomes of this business ideology. Green Banking adoption is adapted as a second-order construct with four first-order reflective constructs to ensure in-depth conceptualization of the construct. Design/methodology/approach Green Banking adoption is studied at the bank branch level in a developing country, i.e. Pakistan. The data is collected from the branch managers of 212 bank branches from five major cities of Pakistan through mails. Self-administered survey was used for the data collection. The data was analyzed through the application of partial least square-structured equation modeling in SMART PLS 3.2.9. The measurement model and the structural model of the research framework were analyzed through the two-stage approach of the second-order analysis. Findings The results indicate a positive relationship between customer and competitor pressure and Green Banking adoption among bank branches in Pakistan depicting an influence of various environmental ethical pressures on bank’s adoption practices. Community pressure was shown to have no significant influence on Green Banking adoption at the branch level. The moderator of top management commitment caused a positive influence on the relationship between all the studied stakeholder pressures and Green Banking adoption. Branch managers reported branch image and operational efficiency to be enhanced due to Green Banking adoption. Originality/value This study attempts to fill in the significant gap in Green Banking adoption literature through an empirical analysis of Green Banking’s second-order construct. Currently, limited literature exists on the various aspects of Green Banking adoption, and an empirical study has not been conducted at the bank branch level. The study contributes significant practical, theoretical and methodological contributions to the area of Green Banking.

How Do Stakeholder Pressures Affect Corporate Social Responsibility Adoption? Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Enterprises in Ethiopia

In today’s globalized world, one of the great challenges for enterprises is integrating CSR adoption into their operations. The study aims to investigate how stakeholder pressure influences the adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices by Chinese medium and large-scale manufacturing enterprises in Ethiopia. This study used a mixed-methods research approach that includes primary and secondary data sources. The employed research data were analyzed using stakeholder theory, structural equation modeling, and multivariate regression analysis to identify the causal relationship between the stakeholder pressures and CSR adoption. The finding shows that overseas Chinese medium and large-scale enterprises at least have CSR awareness to meet compliance requirements. Comparatively, employees, community, and customers are the most influential and significant factors determining the enterprises’ stakeholder pressure on the CSR engagement. The finding indicates that Chinese enterprises are unrecognized for their CSR contribution due to a lack of public relation in displaying what they display the firms are doing. There is no strong link between Chinese manufacturing enterprises and the regulatory stakeholders to implement inclusive CSR awareness and eliminate conflicts of interest on legal frameworks. The study proposed some recommendations to solve the gaps regarding indifference to CSR adoption, the community’s lack of concern for CSR, and lack of proactive involvement. Government laws are required to legally control unbalanced practices and distorted views, as well as to guide fixing conflicts of interest. These finding are important for enterprises, policymakers, government officials, and local and foreign investors to identify, understand, and use the driving factors of stakeholder pressures on CSR practices.

External pressures on accounting study programs: An institutional approach of stakeholder expectations

Research Question: What are the requirements and expectations of each class of external stakeholders? Is there any convergence between the identified expectations? Motivation: There is a large variety of stakeholder expectations that universities are confronted with in their permanent search for social legitimacy, acknowledgement and survival. In the case of accounting study programs, their strong relationships with practitioners and professional associations, as emphasized in previous research in accounting education in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, add to the expectations that need to be met. Idea: This paper explores external stakeholder expectations of accounting study programs provided by Romanian universities, in order to identify the elements to which these expectations converge. Data: Data was collected only from public documents (laws and regulations, reports, studies, press releases, websites of relevant bodies etc.). Tools: A review of relevant public documents has been performed. Findings: As expected, all stakeholders require quality. Still, they ascribe different meanings to quality, evaluate quality in different manners, and hence exert various pressures. More, we observed that all types of isomorphism: coercive, mimetic, normative, as well as competitive are involved in assuring quality and meeting expectations. Contribution: The study contributes to literature with a complex approach, employing stakeholder and institutional theory, in the context of the extensive environment of higher education. In terms of practice, by taking stock of stakeholder requirements and expectations, the study calls the attention of decision makers to stakeholder pressures and the need to adjust accounting study programs accordingly.

Environmental Performance Improvements and External Stakeholder Pressures in Companies with Certified Environmental Management System

The relationship between environmental performance and Environmental Management Systems has been widely investigated by international researches. Despite this, our paper adds new perspectives to the current literature framework. First, it is focused on companies with an Environmental Management System registered according to EMAS Regulation, while many previous studies considered also ISO14001 certified companies. Second, to achieve the objectives of this paper, a wide sample of Italian companies was considered, and the results of a questionnaire survey filled out by 143 organizations are reported. In addition, this study points out the relationship between environmental performance and stakeholder pressures which have not been thoroughly investigated in previous papers. The results show that EMAS positively influences performance on some environmental aspects such as water consumption and emissions into the atmosphere, while this positive influence is not confirmed for other aspects. The Public Authorities represent the stakeholder identified by the survey as the main external pressure to improve environmental performance.

ESG push will help improve diversity in US companies

Significance Policy, disclosure requirements and stakeholder pressures, particularly from investors, push them in that direction. The exception is diversity and inclusion, which form part of corporate responses to the competition for talent and labour market tightness. Rebalancing environmental, social and governance (ESG) progress requires realigning the incentives. Impacts Efforts will intensify for international coordination on ESG reporting standards and auditing. Executive compensation will increasingly be linked to meeting ESG goals but this will need close investor scrutiny of authenticity. If banks expand sustainability loans beyond green projects, it will mitigate corporate prioritisation of environmental over other ESG aims.

Orchestration versus bookkeeping: How stakeholder pressures drive a healthcare purchaser’s institutional logics

Background Healthcare purchasers such as health insurers and governmental bodies are expected to strategically manage chronic care chains. In doing so, purchasers can contribute to the goal of improving task division and collaboration between chronic care providers as has been recommended by numerous studies. However, healthcare purchasing research indicates that, in most countries, purchasers still struggle to fulfil a proactive, strategic approach. Consequently, a typical pattern occurs in which care improvement initiatives are instigated, but not transformed into regular care. By acknowledging that healthcare purchasers are embedded in a care chain of stakeholders who have different, sometimes conflicting, interests and, by taking an institutional logics lens, we seek to explain why achieving strategic purchasing and sustainable improvement is so elusive. Method and findings We present a longitudinal case study in which we follow a health insurer and care providers aiming to improve the care of patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in a region of the Netherlands. Taking a theoretical lens of institutional logics, our aim was to answer ‘how stakeholder pressures influence a purchaser’s use of institutional logics when pursuing the right care at the right place’. The insurer by default predominantly expressed a bookkeeper’s logic, reflecting a focus on controlling short-term care costs by managing individual providers. Over time, a contrasting orchestrator’s logic emerged in an attempt to achieve chain-wide improvement, striving for better health outcomes and lower long-term costs. We established five types of stakeholder pressure to explain the shift in logic adoption: relationship pressures, cost pressures, medical demands, public health demands and uncertainty. Linking the changes in logic over time with stakeholder pressures showed that, firstly, the different pressures interact in influencing the purchaser. Secondly, we saw that the lack of intra-organisational alignment affects how the purchaser deals with the different stakeholder pressures. Conclusions By highlighting the purchaser’s difficult position in the care chain and the consequences of their own internal responses, we now better understand why the intended orchestrator’s logic and thereby a strategic approach to purchasing chronic care proves unsustainable within the Dutch healthcare system of managed competition.

THE DOMINO EFFECT OF PERCEIVED STAKEHOLDER PRESSURES ON ECO-CONTROLS

We examine how managers orchestrate their eco-control package in reaction to different perceived environmental stakeholder pressures. Using survey data from Canadian manufacturing firms, our results show that environmental pressures perceived from societal stakeholders have a greater influence on the integration of environmental objectives into strategic planning than pressures perceived from business stakeholders. This suggests that business stakeholders act as a force that mostly maintains the scope of strategic environmental orientations, while societal stakeholders act as a force that mostly expands the scope of strategic orientations by stimulating further consideration of environmental issues as strategic objectives. The integration of environmental objectives in strategic planning stimulates a domino effect within the eco-control package, where the adaptation of strategic objectives leads to greater mobilization of other eco-controls. This domino effect represents successive effects among components of the eco-control package, revealing how stakeholder pressures play a role in stimulating multi-layered changes in eco-control mobilization.

Wicked problems: university research topic convergence despite divergence in local educational and innovation policies

Purpose This study aims to determine how sustainable development (SD) demands (according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) SD themes from 2005) are connected to the contents of education, research, development and innovation (RDI) in higher education institutions (HEI). Education and the RDI nexus may affect HEI’s capability to handle SD-related wicked problems and enhance their societal impact. Design/methodology/approach This paper examined SD-oriented curricula contents of two universities (Brazil and Finland) and counted the number of SD-related research outcomes. In addition, conceptual modelling was used to analyse the mechanisms that may be directing HEIs’ SD work in local innovation. Findings The data showed a convergence deviation in the RDI of SD-related subjects between the two HEIs. There was no correlation between SD-oriented education and RDI-work in either HEI. Education and RDI processes have different UNECE SD themes at the focal point, and the education-research nexus is lacking. This difference indicates that new SD-related knowledge produced through RDI was not effectively used in education. Modelling revealed that the convergence in RDI outcomes arose from the same kind of local business, industry and societal challenges, implementing effective stakeholder pressures into HEIs. The results may indicate that stakeholder SD needs were not directly transferred into the competence qualification of the curriculum. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first quantitative study to reveal the independence of universities’ SD-related RDI subjects on educational curricula.