Family Embeddedness Is Detrimental to Going Green: Family Involvement and Green Strategies

Abstract

We investigate the intensely debated but unexplored question of how family involvement affects corporate green strategies. Employing a dataset of 4750 firm-year observations over the period of 2015–2021 of Chinese A-listed family firms, our empirical findings indicate that family involvement has a negative and significant relationship with corporate green strategies. These outcomes are consistent with the socio-emotional wealth (SEW) “dark side.” Our outcomes suggest that this relationship is strengthened in highly polluted firms. Furthermore, we employ a series of additional checks, namely, alternative measures, endogeneity test, count data models, family involvement measures, future impact test, the explanatory variable lag by one period, sample change and heterogeneity test, and the outcomes of all these tests show that baseline findings remain robust after employing a series of these tests. The given study has crucial theoretical and practical implications for regulators, policymakers and practitioners, especially because it provides key insights into the inside stakeholders of family firms. To promote environmental efforts in family-involved firms, policymakers ought to enact legislation or specific incentives. When assessing a company's sustainability commitment, stakeholders and investors should also take family involvement into consideration.