The Impact of Green Organizational Identity on Green Competitive Advantage: The Role of Green Ambidexterity Innovation and Organizational Flexibility

Abstract

There is no consistent result on the relationship between green organizational identity (GOI) and corporate green competitive advantage (GCA) in the existing literature. The omission of crucial mediating variables may be one of the important reasons. Based on the organizational identity theory and exploration-exploitation paradigm, this article studies the relationship between GOI and GCA in a model that includes mediating variables composed of green exploitative innovation (GEI) and green exploratory innovation (GER), and organizational flexibility (OF) as a moderating variable. The empirical test of survey data from polluting enterprises in China shows that GOI has a positive effect on green ambidexterity innovation and GCA. Both GEI and GER have a positive impact on GCA. Moreover, green ambidexterity innovation has a partial mediating effect between GOI and GCA, but the moderating effect of OF between green ambidexterity innovation (GAI) and GCA is different, and OF only negatively moderates the relationship between GER and GCA. These findings suggest that GOI can influence firms to choose different innovative ways between GEI and GER to obtain GCA, which counts on different levels of OF.