The pivotal roles of corporate environment responsibility

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test competing models of the different causal relationships regarding the motivations for corporate environmental responsibility, the adoption of environmental product policies and the related enhancement of environmental performance.

This study uses a mail survey and employs structural equation modeling to test the different relationships among the constructs examined. By testing the fitness of the competing model models, the appropriate relationships are identified.

The environmental performance is directly influenced by instrumental motives and political motives, which have indirect effects on environmental performance through corporate environmental responsibility. These also reveal that instrumental motives have marginal effects on both corporate environmental responsibility and environmental performance, and the marginal effects of political motives on environmental performance are also clearly shown. Notably, the results reveal that the corporate environmental responsibly is a pivot in these cause‐effect relationships.

Although this study provides researchers and policy makers with a framework to study environmental responsibility in different business environments, it did not undertake a deeper analysis to better understand business and organizational cultures and business environments regarding the implementation of an environmentally oriented policy. Furthermore, the model was only tested with survey data from Taiwan, although some of samples operate internationally.

From the perspective of a practical business context, practitioners should implement corporate responsibility policies that are specifically related to their political environments. For example, when doing businesses in Taiwan, the political motives involved in environmental protection will be the key to success when undertaking policies related to corporate environmental responsibility.

The results of this research indicate that there is an indirect heavy loading of corporate environmental responsibility on environmental performance. Therefore, corporate environmental responsibility is the pivotal factor in firms' adoption of environmentally oriented policies.