Does National Culture Diversity Impact Corporate Water Performance?

Abstract

This paper aims to test the influence of national cultural divergence on corporate water performance.Corporate water management is usually internally driven, but a wider context should be looked into to govern this natural resource. Drawing on the institutional governance systems theory, we investigate the basis of country-specific factors that contribute to corporate water performance. This result can be enlightened because corporate sustainability performance is responsive to forces, risks, and rewards, which eventually shaped by the cultural setting. Using 340 observations of electric utility companies from the years 2015 to 2019, we find that certain cultural dimensions do impact corporate water performance, namely, masculinity (femininity) and long-term (short-term) orientation. The other four dimensions of national culture, including individualism, indulgence, power distance and uncertainty avoidance, indicate an insignificant relationship with corporate water performance. The study suggests that culture, as one of the institutional governance attributes, could play a significant role in enhancing the water performance of companies.