The Configuration Effect of Institutional Environment, Organizational Slack Resources, and Managerial Perceptions on the Corporate Water Responsibility of Small- and Medium-Sized Corporations

Under the background of the water crisis, there has been much research on corporate water responsibility (CWR), a subfield of corporate environmental responsibility (CER). Studies on CWR and CER are mainly focused on isolated factors, such as institutional pressure, corporate features, and managerial perceptions, with a notable lack of consensus. These studies have largely ignored the complex relationship between different contributing factors; thus, the internal mechanism of the multi-level synergistic influence of such factors on CWR or CER remains unclear. Configuration theory forgoes consideration of the correlation between variables and instead analyzes the synergistic effect between variables from the perspective of set theory. Thus, this paper focuses on formal and informal institutional pressure, unabsorbed and absorbed CSR slack, and economic and ethical perceptions, and uses fsQCA to investigate the configurations contributing or unconducive to a high level of CWR from a configuration theory perspective. The results show that three configurations contribute and two configurations are unconducive to a high level of CWR. Managerial perception is foundational for implementing CWR, and ethical perception is a necessary condition for high-level CWR, while a lack of benefit perception contributes to a lower level of CWR.