Are red managers greener? The relationship of communist CEOs and corporate environmental responsibility in China
ISSN: 0368-492X
Article publication date: 15 March 2022
Issue publication date: 25 September 2023
Abstract
Purpose
As China's only ruling party, will the Communist Party influence corporate decisions? The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how the political ideology of CEOs affects the environmental responsibility of Chinese family firms and its effects on Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER), in addition to a cohesive set of corporate governance contingency factors.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses a series of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression estimates and two-stage approach to examine four main hypotheses, based on 7,824 observations corresponding to 1,919 family firms in China from 2004 to 2015.
Findings
The study's findings show that CEOs imprinted with communist ideology are significantly positively related to CER in family firms, that the moderating role of ownership concentration is not significant, that board independence positively moderates the focal relationship and that CEO duality negatively moderates this relationship.
Originality/value
The paper expands the research of CEOs' political ideology to the ecological context, which are of significance to both theory and practice.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71672194). The authors thank the Editors and referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Conflicts of interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Citation
Su, Y. and Zhang, L. (2023), "Are red managers greener? The relationship of communist CEOs and corporate environmental responsibility in China", Kybernetes, Vol. 52 No. 9, pp. 3474-3494. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-09-2021-0868
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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