Multiple Paths for Driving Environmental Sustainability Orientation from the Perspective of Configuration

Environmental sustainability orientation (ESO) is critical to leading sustainable business practices, so it has become a promising and attractive topic for green sustainable development. However, how to coordinate the forces of government, consumers, competitors, and managers to drive firms to adopt ESO is an important theoretical and practical issue to be further studied. Based on stakeholder theory, we develop a configurational framework and propose that high ESO is contingent upon the coordination among perceived policy pressure, consumer pressure, competitive pressure, and manager commitment. By using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) in 127 cases, we reveal that single antecedent condition of stakeholder is difficult to form high ESO and identify them into three different pathways. The results further indicate that there is an asymmetric relationship between the three high ESO paths and the two non-high ESO paths, that is, the relationship between “high ESO†and “non-high ESO†is not either/or. The study highlights the theoretical significance of ESO based on the configuration of multiple antecedents among different stakeholders, which makes up the gap of the traditional statistical analysis on the interpretation of ESO. We also provide implications for the government and enterprises to promote the formation of ESO.