Moving toward environmental sustainability through green entrepreneurship: assessing the moderating role of managerial environmental commitment

Abstract

The environmental component has become a critical element in ensuring the company´s survival leading to growing attention to green entrepreneurship. Environmental innovation, as the core of green entrepreneurship, has been widely recognized in the literature for its significant role in combating climate change; however, the different factors that encourage companies to embrace environmental innovations are still under investigation. The main objective of this study was to determine how top management commitment influences, both directly and indirectly, green entrepreneurship, proxied by environmental innovation, and its outcomes. This study was conducted in the Spanish wine sector, which has been relatively unexplored to date. We developed a Structural Equation Model (SEM) to test the proposed hypotheses. Our results reveal that the demand for sustainable products, regulation, and top management environmental commitment positively influence environmental innovation. Secondly, we found that investment in such innovations allows companies to simultaneously achieve higher financial and environmental returns. Furthermore, we confirmed that top management’s environmental commitment influences both the company’s perception of the importance of stakeholder demands and the relationship between environmental innovation and performance. These findings have significant implications for the environmental management and political regulation literature, particularly within the specific context of the wine sector.