Eco-friendly product development strategy: antecedents, outcomes, and contingent effects

Abstract

Integrating sustainability aspects into product development has long been recognized as a strategic priority for practitioners. Yet the literature reports mixed results on the product development effectiveness outcomes of sustainable product development strategies, while scant research has investigated how companies integrate environmental aspects into product development. This study develops a model that integrates effectiveness-enhancing outcomes and organizational inputs of eco-friendly product development strategies. Using questionnaire responses from firms from multiple industries, supplemented with lagged primary product development performance data, we find that top management commitment and corporate environmental support policies can facilitate eco-friendly product development strategies, while environmental performance incentives do not. In turn, the adoption of such strategies has a positive effect on firms' product development effectiveness. This effect weakens when business conditions are highly complex but tends to become stronger with increasing levels of munificence in the business environment. These findings have important implications for practitioners and researchers that are discussed.

Determinants and Characteristics of Korean Companies’ Carbon Management under the Carbon Pricing Scheme

“…This is consistent with the views of a previous study [2] for Korean companies. In promoting carbon management, the regression analysis reaffirmed the finding in [38] that top manager's support is the most essential determinant factor of all the strategic stages of carbon management this study defined. Further, whether a company adopts proactive and strategic carbon management, the significance of to what extend top manager understand the policy takes on a higher level of importance.…”

“…There are several drivers and determinants of corporate carbon management: regional affiliations [5], company size [5,10,36], absolute amount of CO 2 emissions [5], industries across different sectors [11], energy prices [12], stakeholder pressures [1,13], governmental pressures through regulations [37], competitors' performance in carbon management [10] and the role of top management [38].…”

‘Carrots for Corporate Sustainability’: Impacts of Incentive Inclusiveness and Variety on Environmental Performance

“…Russo and Harrison's () research remains the most prominent exception, finding a link between plant manager compensation and reduced emissions, and arguing that ‘incentives help shifting managerial attention to environmental issues’ (p. 590). Yet a survey by Katsikeas et al () with UK senior managers could not find a significant impact of environmental performance incentives on eco‐friendly product development strategies.…”

“…Therefore, in this paper we investigate the impact of incentives for improved organizational environmental performance by paying special attention to the observable variation in incentive design schemes across organizations, in terms of both the incentive beneficiaries and the forms that such incentives take. We conceptualize environmental performance incentives as organizational reward systems designed to stimulate and support employees' knowledge‐sharing routines, information absorption and skill transmission (Katsikeas et al , ) designed to reduce firms' physical impacts on the natural environment. Specifically, drawing on a large dataset of multinational enterprises we investigate the extent to which greater inclusiveness of incentive beneficiaries across different organizational levels and greater variety of incentive types help companies to reduce their corporate carbon footprints, an area of environmental performance coming under increasing pressure from a range of stakeholders (Depoers et al , ; Howard‐Grenville et al , ; Lee, ).…”

Sustainability in The Banking Industry: A Strategic Multi‐Criterion Analysis

“…With increasing environmental concern and consumers' demand for environmentally friendly products or services, firms have introduced a variety of green innovative initiatives and practices, such as green products and service design (Lee et al , ; Tseng, ; Tseng et al , ; Yadav et al , ). The focus is put, in particular, on green technologies and green management (Manley et al , ; Katsikeas et al , ). Considering the enormous environmental challenges in today's scenario – such as a number of environmental laws and regulations, demanding organizational stakeholders' pressures and gaining competitive advantage – organizations and businesses are attempting to balance social, economic and environmental performance through sustainable development principles (Boiral, ; Jabbour and Jabbour, ; Hubbard, ; Shen et al , ; Ortiz‐de‐Mandojana and Bansal, ).…”