Green technological distance and environmental strategies: the moderating role of green structural capital
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-06-2020-0217 |
| Published date | 19 January 2021 |
| Date | 19 January 2021 |
| Pages | 938-963 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management,HR & organizational behaviour,Organizational structure/dynamics,Accounting & finance,Accounting/accountancy,Behavioural accounting |
| Author | Javier Amores-Salvadó,Jorge Cruz-González,Miriam Delgado-Verde,Jaime González-Masip |
Green technological distance and
environmental strategies:
the moderating role of green
structural capital
Javier Amores-Salvad
o, Jorge Cruz-Gonz
alez and
Miriam Delgado-Verde
Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences, Complutense University of Madrid,
Madrid, Spain, and
Jaime Gonz
alez-Masip
Rey Juan Carlos University - Vicalvaro Campus, Madrid, Spain
Abstract
Purpose –This paper investigates the impact of green technological distance (GTD) –environmental
technologicalknowledge distance between the firm and the industry –on the adoption of proactive and reactive
environmental strategies and whether this relationship is moderated by different manifestations of green
structural capital, i.e. environmental incentives, senior environmental responsibilities and external
environmental communication.
Design/methodology/approach –The empirical analysis is conducted on a sample of 202 manufacturing
companies from Spain. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the moderating effect of green
structural capital.
Findings –Results show that the role of green structural capital as guiding factor of the environmental
response of the firm and organizational support to cope with the GTD between the firm and the industry is
diverse and depends on the manifestation of green structural capital under analysis. The establishment of
environmental incentives for managers and the presence of environmental information in the firm’s external
communications –as two expressions of green structural capital –show a different behavior when facing the
environmental technological challenge, supporting environmental reactive and proactive strategies
respectively. In addition, GTD increases the adoption of reactive environmental strategies, while it has no
direct effect on the implementation of proactive environmental practices.
Originality/value –Using the novel construct of GTD and the analysis of a so far unstudied interaction, the
study contributes to the literature on intellectual capital and environmental strategy considering the technical
change associated to the environmental challenge. In so doing, it improves the understanding of the role of
green structural capital as a guiding factor of the environmental response of the firm and organizational
support to cope with the GTD between the firm and the industry.
Keywords Green technological distance, Environmental strategies, Green intellectual capital, Green
structural capital
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Despite the growing development of the literature on environmental strategies and the
importance of the role of green intellectual capital in these strategies (L
opez-Gamero et al.,
2011;Chuang and Huang, 2015), there is little empirical work that provides a more detailed
view of green intellectual capital that goes beyond its economic implications to address its
JIC
22,5
938
The authors would like to thank for the financial support to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and
Competitiveness (Project ECO2012-38190 and Project ECO2015-65251- P) and Banco Santander-UCM
(Project PR26/16-15B-1).
Declarations of interest: None
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1469-1930.htm
Received 30 June 2020
Revised 25 October 2020
20 December 2020
Accepted 2 January 2021
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 22 No. 5, 2021
pp. 938-963
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-06-2020-0217
connection with the innovative posture of the firm in the environmental arena (Alvino
et al., 2020).
This lack of analysis on the concept of green intellectual capital deprives us of
understanding many of the intangible factors behind the firms’environmental stance. Green
intellectual capital, understood as the sum of all kinds of knowledge, intangible assets,
capabilities, experience or relationships related to the environmental management of the firm
(Chen, 2008;Chang and Chen, 2012;Delgado-Verde et al., 2014) is of the utmost importance
since it is a key factor to conduct the green management of the firm (L
opez-Gamero et al.,
2011). In particular, green structural capital, as a broad concept containing “organizational
commitments, knowledge management systems, reward systems, information technology
systems, databases, managerial institution, operation processes, managerial philosophies,
organizational culture, company images, patents, copy rights, and trademarks, etc. about
environmental protection”(Chen, 2008, p. 275), in addition to being the essential support for
the development of environmental strategies (Lin and Ho, 2011), it is also decisive in the realm
of the environmental technological knowledge of the firm, since it is of vital importance for the
development of new ecological processes and products (L
opez-Gamero et al., 2011) that may
require the deployment of a kind of environmental technological knowledge that can be
sometimes distant from industry standards. In this regard, and only as an illustrative
example, we can cite the case of the automotive industry, where carmakers who want totake a
great leap forward with respect to industry environmental technological standards, are not
only overhauling their factories and technologies and spending billions of dollars to develop
modular electric car production platforms (Riley, 2019) but also drastically changing their
business models and organizational systems –and consequently their green structural
capital –to produce electric cars.
However, despite this practical evidence, the role played by green structural capital in the
technical change associated to the environmental challenge and its connection with the
environmental response of the firms have been scarcely treated and neglected by the
environmental management literature.
In order to fill these gaps in the literature on organizations and the natural environment,
the aim of this paper is to determine the role of the differe nt manifestations of green
structural capital as guiding factors of the environmental response of the firm and
organizational support to cope with the technical change associated to the environmental
challenge.
To this end, starting with the concept of green technological distance (GTD) –distance in
terms of environmental technological knowledge between the firm and the industry –we
analyze the role of the green structural capital in the relationship between GTD and the
environmental position of the company. That is, we empirically contrast whether green
structural capital, as a versatile intangible of high organizational value, in its different
manifestations, serves as a support for the environmental strategies of companies –
regardless of its reactive or proactive orientation –when dealing with the environmental
technological challenge. The results point to the fact that the influence of green structural
capital on the company’s environmental response to the environmental technological
change is diverse and depends on the manifestation of green structural capital under
analysis.
The remainder of the article is organized as follows: In section 2, we pose the main
theoretical support for our arguments regarding the concepts of GTD, environmental
strategies and green structural capital. This section results in the development of the
hypotheses under analysis and in the research model to be contrasted. Section 3 is devoted to
data collection, methods as well as variables characterization and measurement. Section 4
shows the results and the statistical analyses carried out to contrast the hypotheses, and
finally section 5 is devoted to the discussion, conclusions development and implications for
The impact of
GTD on
environmental
strategies
939
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