Stakeholder Pressures and Corporate Environmental Strategies: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Stakeholder pressures and corporate environmental strategies continue to be important topics of corporate sustainability. Limited by sample size, there is a lack of general conclusions on which groups of stakeholder pressures are the main drivers of environmental strategies. Amassing a database of 58 empirical studies, the authors divided stakeholder pressures into four groups—internal, coercive, market, and social pressure—and explored the relationship between different pressures and environmental strategies by conducting a meta-analysis. The main result shows that internal pressure is the main driver of environmental strategies. Further empirical results show that stakeholder pressures could have a larger effect on corporate environmental strategies in developed countries and that non-manufacturing firms could change their environmental strategies more easily than manufacturing firms. The results provide the practical implication that a green industry transition is strongly needed in the manufacturing industry, especially for polluting industries, and that firms in polluting industries should implement environmental strategy changes in the future. This paper contributes to clarifying the relationship between stakeholder pressures and corporate environmental strategies based on a meta-analysis.