Despite the prevailing emphasis on the critical role of organisational leadership in fostering green innovation (GI), limited research explores how and under what conditions different leadership styles—green entrepreneurial and green transformational leadership—uniquely drive green product innovation (GDI) and green process innovation (GPI). Drawing on upper echelons theory, this study investigates the distinct impacts of green entrepreneurial and transformational leadership on the adoption of GDI and GPI and examines how social ties—business ties (BT) and political ties (PT)—differently influence these relationships.
The proposed hypotheses are examined through structural equation modeling in SPSS-24 and AMOS-21. This study comprises a dataset of 296 Chinese firms, each represented by two key informants, totaling 592 respondents, spanning various industries.
The findings reveal that green entrepreneurial leadership is more effective in promoting GDI than GPI, whereas green transformational leadership exhibits a stronger association with GPI than GDI. Furthermore, the study highlights that firms led by green entrepreneurial leaders benefit more from BT than from PT in advancing GDI, while firms with green transformational leaders rely more on PT than on BT to adopt GPI.
As one of the first studies of its kind, this research seeks to investigate how and under what conditions firms can adopt distinct kinds of GI. Overall, it adds value to strategic leadership and social capital literature by shedding novel insights into the distinct roles of leadership and social ties in advancing targeted GI strategies.
