The Corporate Governance of Environmental Sustainability: A Review and Proposal for More Integrated Research

2021
As corporations' environmental impact comes under greater scrutiny by global financial, regulatory, and societal stakeholders, management scholars have increasingly focused on the role of corporate governance as a tool for driving environmental initiatives. Still, we lack a comprehensive and systematic understanding of this emergent body of inquiry and a holistic agenda for future research. To address this gap, our integrative framework relates the key corporate governance actors to environmental sustainability outcomes from the extant literature and highlights its main methodological approaches and theoretical arguments. Our framework provides a critical analysis of what we know and points to the knowledge gaps around owners, boards of directors, CEOs, top management teams, and employees as corporate governance actors. We then highlight limitations in the existing literature as significant opportunities for further research to resolve its ambiguous conceptualizations of environmental sustainability constructs, various methodological and theoretical challenges, incomplete engagement with the global dimension of environmental sustainability, and limited analysis of how corporate governance actors may interact to shape environmental sustainability outcomes. We conclude by proposing novel approaches for addressing these issues, which we believe could generate a better way forward on studying the corporate governance of environmental sustainability.
JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT
页码:1468-1497|卷号:47|期号:6
ISSN:0149-2063
收录类型
SSCI
发表日期
2021
学科领域
循证经济学
国家
美国
语种
英语
DOI
10.1177/0149206321991212
EISSN
1557-1211
资助机构
Spanish Ministry of Science EducationSpanish Government [ECO2016-75909-P]; Spanish Research AgencySpanish Government [PID2019-106725GB-I00]; Donahue Center for Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at the University of Massachusetts Lowell
资助信息
We are grateful for the partial funding from the research grants ECO2016-75909-P (Spanish Ministry of Science & Education) and PID2019-106725GB-I00 (Spanish Research Agency, 10.13039/501100011033). Peter A. Tashman would like to acknowledge generous support from the Donahue Center for Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. We thank Isadora Archilha Souza and Raphaelle Charbit for their research assistance. Furthermore, we thank our Associate Editor Bill Wan, and the three anonymous reviewers for helping us make this article much stronger. All errors remain ours.
被引频次(WOS)
5
被引更新日期
2022-01
来源机构
Northeastern University Universitat Ramon Llull University of Granada University of Massachusetts System University of Massachusetts Lowell
关键词
corporate governance environmental sustainability ownership boards of directors CEO top management team employees