Does Green Entrepreneurial Orientation Improve the Sustainable Performance of Agribusiness? Evidence from China

Abstract

Agribusinesses play an important role in the process of green and low-carbon transformation of China’s economy. It is extremely necessary to explore how to promote green entrepreneurship in agribusiness to promote a win-win situation for the environmental and economic and social performance to achieve the sustainable development goals of agribusinesses. Based on intellectual capital theory and natural resource-based theory, this study introduces green intellectual capital (GIC) and sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) as chain mediators to build a theoretical model for exploring the impact mechanism of green entrepreneurial orientation (GEO) on sustainable performance (SP) of agribusinesses. Through the empirical analysis of 621 agribusinesses’ research data, the results show that (1) GEO has a positive impact on SP of agribusinesses; (2) GIC and SBMI are important transmission factors for the transformation of green entrepreneurial orientation into the sustainable performance of enterprises, and play a mediating role in the relationship between GEO and SP of agribusinesses; and (3) GEO promotes SBMI through the accumulation of GCI, which in turn enhances SP of agribusiness. This study not only enriches the theoretical scope of green entrepreneurship research in terms of subdimensions, but also provides theoretical references and practical guidance for agribusinesses to improve their sustainable performance.