Promoting Sustainable Development: Green Strategies and Firm Performance in Emerging Economies

ABSTRACT Despite efforts by scholars and practitioners to challenge the traditional view of environmental management, the empirical evidence regarding whether it pays to be green remains a piece of the puzzle in the sustainability and strategic management scholarship. To address this knowledge gap, this study, guided by a resource‐based view, explores how green strategies—reactive green strategy (RGS) and proactive green strategy (PGS)—influence firm performance (FP) directly and under corporate venturing (CV)—domestic versus international. Using a sample of 290 Chinese firms, the data are analyzed through SPSS 24, and the proposed hypotheses are tested via structural equational modeling. The findings reveal that PGS exhibits a significantly stronger positive effect on FP compared to RGS. Moreover, the effectiveness of each strategy varies depending on the type of CV. Specifically, firms adopting RGS experience more significant performance benefits from domestic venturing than from international venturing. Conversely, firms employing PGS gain more from international venturing than from domestic venturing for achieving FP. Overall, this study contributes to the sustainability and entrepreneurship literature by clarifying how distinct green strategies impact FP under varying CV contexts. These findings also provide nuanced insights for scholars and practitioners, encouraging further exploration of green strategies' outcomes, especially in emerging economies.