Leading the Way to Greening: Aligning Leadership Styles and Market Learning for Radical and Incremental Green Innovation
研究绿色创业型领导和变革型领导如何分别促进激进和渐进式绿色创新，并发现探索性学习与创业型领导、利用性学习与变革型领导分别搭配时效果更佳，基于315家中国企业的数据。
ABSTRACT The growing urgency of environmental challenges has intensified the need for green innovation (GI), comprising both radical (RGI) and incremental (IGI) forms. While RGI and IGI offer distinct pathways to sustainability—with RGI involving transformative, high‐risk advancements, and IGI consisting of continuous, lower risk improvements—the literature has often overlooked their distinction. Drawing on upper echelons theory, we theorize how green entrepreneurial and green transformational leadership uniquely foster these innovation types, with the former aligning with RGI and latter supporting IGI. We further explicate how market learning—explorative and exploitative learning—interacts with leadership styles to shape GI outcomes. Using multisource data from matched responses of senior managers and CEOs across 315 firms in China, our findings based on hierarchical regression analysis support the hypotheses. Specifically, the findings reveal that firms with green entrepreneurial tend to adopt RGI than IGI, whereas firms with green transformational leadership are more likely to adopt IGI than RGI. Moreover, we find that green entrepreneurial leadership combined with explorative learning boosts RGI, while green transformational leadership paired with exploitative learning favors IGI. Overall, this study contributes by clarifying distinct roles of leadership in driving different GI outcomes and illuminating how market learning shapes these dynamics.