Sustainable leadership under environmental institutional pressures: how CEO green experience fuels eco-innovation and responsible production
Ostic D. Wiredu I. Obrenovic B. Borgi H.
2025Springer Science and Business Media B.V.
Environment, Development and Sustainability
2025
With the increasing pressure on firms to adopt sustainable practices, identifying leadership-level drivers of responsible consumption and production (RCP) has become a critical area of research. While the influence of CEOs on sustainability has been widely explored, limited attention has been paid to the specific role of CEO with green experience particularly in the underexamined context of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This study addresses this gap by investigating how CEOs with green experience drive RCP adoption, while also exploring the mediating role of eco-innovation and the moderating influence of environmental institutional pressures. Using a panel dataset of 321 listed manufacturing firms from 2012 to 2022 and applying a generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator to address endogeneity, the study provides robust empirical evidence. The results reveal that CEO with green experience significantly enhances RCP outcomes, and this relationship is strengthened through eco-innovation. Moreover, both regulatory and normative institutional pressures amplify the impact of CEO with green experience on sustainable practices. The study offers a novel integrative framework by combining upper echelons theory, resource-based view (RBV), and institutional theory to explain how leadership attributes and external pressures interact to promote sustainability. By introducing a new RCP index grounded in SDG 12 and GRI standards, and applying it within the MENA region, the research makes a unique theoretical and regional contribution to the sustainability literature. The findings underscore the importance of policy support and incentives that foster sustainable corporate leadership and innovation in emerging economies.
CEO green experience , Eco-innovation , Emerging economies , Environmental institutional pressure , MENA , Responsible consumption and production
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School of Business and Management, Q University, Almaty, 050026, Kazakhstan
School of Finance and Economics, Jiangsu University, 301 Xuefu Road, Zhenjiang, 212013, China
Zagreb School of Economics and Management, Ulica Filipa Vukasovića 1, Zagreb, 10000, Croatia
Department of Accounting, College of Business Administration, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
School of Business and Management
School of Finance and Economics
Zagreb School of Economics and Management
Department of Accounting
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Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026