Mediating effect of managers' environmental concern: Bridge between external pressures and firms' practices of energy conservation in China

This paper extends previous literature of corporate environmental practices by empirically exploring the relationship between external pressures and firm's energy conservation practices with considering the mediating effect of its senior managers' environmental concerns. A questionnaire survey is used to collect data from 187 industrial firms located in the Circum-Bohai Sea Economic Zone of China. Partial least squares structural equation modeling is employed to analyze the survey data collected and test the research hypotheses in the model. The results show that a senior manager's environmental concerns play a significant role in the connection between firms' energy saving practices and the external pressures such as normative and mimetic pressures. However, the environmental concern of senior managers is only positively related to the energy conservation strategy - it shows no direct association with the concrete operations of energy conservation.