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I don't Want to be Green: Prosocial Motivation Effects on Firm Environmental Innovation Rejection Decisions

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Abstract

Although the political and consumer consciousness has turned increasingly green, many firms continue to resist the adoption of environment-friendly technological innovations—even in the face of higher costs, negative health effects, and stricter government oversight. This article examines how business owners weigh the trade-offs associated with environment-friendly innovations by examining the role of prosocial motivation in their decision-making process. We use primary data to overcome a common restriction in studying environmental innovations—the scarcity of relevant data—to analyze how business owners’ expectations, perceptions, and motivations affect innovation in organizational processes and, consequently, the level of environmental friendliness of their products or services. We found that prosocial motivation had a significant negative impact on innovation adoption and that it is expressed differently under high and low levels of customer compatibility—possibly because business owners have a larger number of competing social objectives and priorities. Our results further showed that the innovation’s ability to satisfy downstream customer demands has the greatest impact on environment-friendly innovation adoption decisions by business owners. This study enhances our understanding of how business owners make innovation decisions based on competing business, environmental and social objectives and provides a foundation for future research in this area.

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the special issue editors Stefano Brusoni and Antonino Vaccaro and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. This paper has also benefited from the helpful comments of friends and colleagues at Indiana University and participants at the Ethics, Technology and Organizational Innovation Conference organized by ETH, Zurich and IESE Business School in 2014.

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  1. Department of Management & Entrepreneurship, Suffolk University, 8 Ashburton Place, Boston, MA, 02108, USA

    Bari L. Bendell

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Correspondence to Bari L. Bendell.

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Table 3 Variable definitions & operationalizations of terms
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Bendell, B.L. I don't Want to be Green: Prosocial Motivation Effects on Firm Environmental Innovation Rejection Decisions. J Bus Ethics 143, 277–288 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2588-2

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