Asymmetric Pay Adjustment and Green Innovation Resilience: Interactions Among Executive Incentives, Managerial Backgrounds, and Government Subsidies

In the context of intensifying environmental regulation and sustainability pressures, firms increasingly face the challenge of sustaining green innovation under uncertainty. Green innovation resilience, which is defined as a firm’s capacity to maintain green innovation momentum and adaptively evolve technological capabilities amidst uncertainty, represents a critical organizational competence. Moving beyond static output measures, this resilience captures the intertemporal stability of firms’ green patenting activities during turbulent periods. From a systems perspective, executive compensation arrangements represent an important internal incentive mechanism that interacts with managerial characteristics and external policy environments. This study investigates how executive compensation stickiness—defined as asymmetric pay adjustment in response to firm performance—affects green innovation resilience. Using panel data from Chinese A-share-listed firms, we find that executive compensation stickiness significantly promotes green innovation resilience at the 5% level, suggesting that downward pay rigidity mitigates managerial risk aversion and supports tolerance for short-term setbacks in long-horizon green innovation. Furthermore, this positive relationship is further strengthened when executives possess environmental backgrounds (at the 5% level) and when firms receive government green innovation subsidies (at the 10% level), highlighting the interactive role of individual-level attributes and institutional policy support. Overall, the findings demonstrate how incentive asymmetry functions as a systemic property shaping firms’ adaptive responses and contribute to a broader understanding of green innovation resilience in complex socio-technical systems.