Leveraging employee green entrepreneurial orientation for enhancing environmental performance: The multi-level role of green creativity and green decision comprehensiveness

Abstract

In view of increasing demands for employees engaging in environmental sustainability, the authors suggest firms can use employee green entrepreneurial orientation (eGEO) to enhance their environmental performance. Relying on the natural resource-based view as the underlying theoretical foundation and the source–position–performance model as the overarching framework, the authors propose a theoretical model across employee and firm levels to examine how eGEO promotes employee and firm environmental performance. Using multi-source surveys and secondary proxy data through multiple waves of data collection from 246 firms, the results indicate that eGEO has a positive indirect effect on employee environmental performance through employee green creativity and a positive indirect effect on firm environmental performance through firm green creativity. The results further indicate that green decision comprehensiveness strengthens these effects. This study contributes to research on green entrepreneurship by focusing on a novel characteristic of eGEO and by underscoring the necessity of treating green creativity as separate dimensions, employee and firm, that relate eGEO and environmental performance. It also contributes to research on strategic decision-making by revealing which strategic decision processes encourage eGEO in both employee and firm green creativity.