Shackles or catalysts: does clan culture help or hinder Chinese family businesses’ transition to greener technologies?

Purpose In recent years, the green technology transition of family businesses has become a hot issue in academic and practical circles. In emerging entities such as China, the clan culture, as an informal system with invisible value norms, may play a more important role. This paper tries to explore the impact of clan culture on the green technology innovation of Chinese family businesses. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, a fixed-effects Poisson model was applied to data from Chinese listed family businesses from 2003 to 2022 to investigate the effect of clan culture on green technology innovation. Findings This paper finds that clan culture is negatively associated with green innovation in family businesses. Leveraging the “willingness-ability framework”, the mechanism test shows that, on the one hand, clan culture affects the environmental investment, which in turn affects the willingness of family businesses to adopt green innovation. On the other hand, clan culture decreases the financial flexibility, which in turn affects the green innovation ability. Originality/value This paper contributes to the research of driving factors in family businesses’ green innovation and enriches the research on the economic consequences of clan culture. Besides, it provides managerial implications for promoting sustainable development and green transformation of Chinese family businesses.