Top management's green inclusive leadership and sustainable competitive advantage in manufacturing firms: The enabling role of internal CSR communication

Achieving sustainable competitive advantage has become increasingly complex amid intense global environmental pressures. While leadership is widely recognized as an enabler of competitiveness, little is known about how top management's green inclusive leadership fosters sustainable competitive advantage through dynamic organizational capabilities such as green shared vision and green mindfulness. Drawing on the natural resource-based view, we theorize that top management's green inclusive leadership strengthens sustainable competitive advantage in manufacturing firms through these capabilities and that internal corporate social responsibility communication reinforces these effects. Data were collected in two waves from a purposive sample of 215 middle-level managers working in Pakistan's manufacturing sector and analyzed using PROCESS macro models in SPSS. We found that green inclusive leadership directly predicts sustainable competitive advantage, and that green mindfulness, but not green shared vision, mediates this relationship. We also identify a sequential pathway in which green inclusive leadership enhances green shared vision, which subsequently fosters green mindfulness, thereby improving sustainable competitive advantage. Crucially, this sequential mediation is stronger when internal corporate social responsibility communication is high, underscoring the role of communication as a strategic organizational capability. By integrating leadership, vision, mindfulness, and communication, this study advances the natural resource-based view and demonstrates how sustainability messages shared within organizations deepen employee engagement with leadership-driven environmental strategies.