Executives’ environmental awareness and cost-control willingness: drivers of green practices and the moderating roles of policy regulation and market competition

This study examined the effects of two internal drivers—corporate executives’ environmental awareness and their willingness to control costs—on the promotion of corporate green practices. It also investigated how two external factors—governmental policies and market competition—moderate the influence of the independent variables on the implementation of corporate green practices. The researchers distributed 600 questionnaires to logistics corporations, which are major resource consumers and carbon emitters, in 10 provinces (direct municipalities) in China, including Shanghai, and analyzed the collected data using SPSS.27. An analysis of 525 questionnaires revealed that executives’ environmental awareness (0.273) and cost-control willingness (0.385) significantly positively affected corporate green practices; cost-control willingness was a primary driver for implementing green practices in logistics corporations. Governmental policies and market competition positively moderated the effects of executives’ environmental awareness and cost-control willingness on corporate green practice—that is, the promoting effects of these two internal drivers were enhanced by the two external factors. The dual-drive model of internal motivation combined with external pressures in this study enriches the research achievements in this field, and significantly enhanced the enforcement of corporate green strategies, thereby facilitating corporate green transformation and mitigating environmental pressure from carbon emissions.