Abstract
This study contemplates the effectiveness of the cognitive CEO on corporate environmental performance for the 1058 listed Chinese firms on Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges for the years 2015–2019. The contributive concept of the cognitive CEO has been demonstrated through CEO tenure, education, goodwill, and attainment of tacit knowledge while implementing the DAE statistical technique. Additionally, the corporate environmental performance has been formulated, signifying the eight environmental attributes. Convincingly, innovation is intertwined with corporate environmental responsibility, which has been analyzed as a mediator. Remarkably, our findings envisage the cognitive CEO as a promoter of corporate environmental responsibility. Meanwhile, under the patronage of the cognitive CEO, innovation output has been ascertained as a vigorous intensifier of corporate environmental performance as compared with innovation input. Moreover, firms exhibiting specific characteristics like firm age, presence of independent directors, and being a state-owned enterprise proclaim their orientation towards corporate environmental responsibility. Specifically, under the patronage of stakeholder theory, empirical results have been interpreted. Significantly, the integrity of empirical results has been authenticated via the execution of GMM instrumental regression. Lastly, the implication of the study recommends the mangers, academicians, and organizational theorists to perceive the significance of cognitive CEO who can manage the funds for both innovation and corporate environmental responsibility.
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Notes
According to Zhang and Qu (2016), A-share is under excessive surveillance of foreign investors and issued in Yuan.
According to Chen et al. (2018), Shanghai stock exchange has provided guidelines for unveiling the corporate environmental responsibility reports.
Foreign exposure has been defined as a job or working experience in foreign has been defined as a dummy variable (Shahab et al. 2019)
Innovation intensity has been formulated as R&D expenses divided by total sales. Innovation intensity elucidates the propensity of funds in R&D (Classen et al. 2014)
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Funding
This study was supported by the Chinese National Natural Science Fund under Grant number 70671029, Humanities & Social Science Project from the Chinese Ministry of Education under Grant 16YJAZH014, and Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Guangdong Province under Grant GD15CGL03.
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Sarfraz, M., He, B. & Shah, S.G.M. Elucidating the effectiveness of cognitive CEO on corporate environmental performance: the mediating role of corporate innovation. Environ Sci Pollut Res 27, 45938–45948 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-10496-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-10496-7