Transitioning toward Sustainability: How Corporate Sustainability Strategies Affect Stakeholders' Actions

我对企业可持续发展的研究是受到我们面临的重大问题的推动。尽管我们面临着前所未有的气候变化和日益加剧的不平等，仍在应对COVID大流行，但俄罗斯和乌克兰的战争以令人心碎的方式突显了人权危机和极端的政治不稳定。虽然政府运作不好，但我相信企业可以站出来，在大规模解决世界问题方面发挥带头作用。在过去的几十年里，组织还面临着来自不同利益相关者群体的越来越大的压力，要求他们参与可持续发展实践。然而，尽管对企业可持续性的需求日益增长，技术进步和经济增长带来的机会也越来越多，但这些问题仍然存在，社会向可持续发展的过渡似乎越来越不稳定。因此，我正在进行的和拟议的研究考察了利益相关者对企业可持续发展实践的反应之间的相互作用所产生的重要的意想不到的后果，并为企业和政策制定者提供了解决方案，以做好充分准备，解决这些意想不到的问题。具体地说，我提出的研究包括两个主流，并使用两个主要方法。第一个流(组织和行业层面)是利用全球企业的环境、社会和治理(ESG)问题的档案数据进行的定量实证研究。我提议的研究考察了利益相关者如何感知和评估公司的ESG战略，以及公司如何回应。这些见解将阐明推动企业在ESG实践中参与程度差异的关键因素(即，为什么一些公司积极回应并被激励为可持续发展，而另一些公司则不是)。例如，我的其中一个论文章节发现了一个新的现象，即在全球危机等复杂和不确定的时期，公众对企业ESG实践的批评可以创造出不同的路径依赖的企业反应螺旋，并在危机之后随着时间的推移而加强，即一些企业通过变得更具可持续性来争先恐后，而另一些企业通过减少ESG实践来竞相垫底。在我的博士后研究期间，我提出了一项研究，目的是回答“为什么”。具体地说，我将对驱动这种分化螺旋的机制进行更深入的实证研究。例如，在全球危机期间受到高度批评的公司可能面临资源限制和更高的ESG投资成本，以及ESG投资带来的洗绿风险，因此它们可以通过将资源从ESG转移到其他战略活动来获得财务利益。因此，旨在鼓励组织学习和改革的公众批评可能会在当今社会的企业中造成两极分化，从而产生意想不到的影响。第二流(个人层面)使用现场和在线实验方法，重点研究驱动个人利益相关者对企业ESG实践的行为反应的心理机制。我提议的实地实验项目是研究公司如何传达多个目标(即财务、Puspose和ESG)来激励零工员工，以及在什么时候和什么条件下传达ESG可能会适得其反，即导致意想不到的影响，如使员工失去积极性，从而降低绩效。我将通过在线平台招募零工，在我与人共同创立的精准医疗初创公司NextOnc(具有远程工作环境)进行实地实验。我拟议的研究的见解将为如何预测和克服这种意想不到的后果提供重要的学术和实践启示。例如，我的工作可以让公司知道如何最有效地参与和交流ESG实践，以及告诉政策制定者和监管机构如何审查公司并与公司合作，以加快可持续发展实践在我们社会的传播。

My research on corporate sustainability is motivated by the big problems we face. While we are facing unprecedented climate change and rising inequality, and still navigating the COVID pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war has highlighted in heartbreaking ways of the human rights crisis, and extreme political instability. While the governments are not functioning well, I believe businesses can step up and take the lead in solving the world's problems at scale. Over the past decades, organizations are also facing increasing pressures from diverse groups of stakeholders to engage in sustainability practices. Yet, despite growing demands for corporate sustainability and increasing opportunities arising from technological advance and economic growth, such problems persist, and the society's transition toward sustainability appears increasingly precarious. Thus, my ongoing and proposed research examines the important unintended consequences arising from the interaction between stakeholders' reactions to firms' sustainability practices and offers solutions for firms and policy makers to be well prepared and address such unanticipated problems. Specifically, my proposed research includes two main streams and uses two main methods.The first stream (organization- and industry-level) is quantitative empirical studies using archival data of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues of firms globally. My proposed research examines how stakeholders perceive and evaluate firms' ESG strategies, and how firms respond. The insights would shed light on the key factors that drive variation in corporate engagement in ESG practices (i.e., why some firms positively respond and are motivated to be sustainable, while others are not). For instance, one of my dissertation chapters discovers the novel phenomenon that public criticism regarding firms' ESG practices during periods of complexity and uncertainty such as global crises can create divergent path-dependent spirals of firms' responses and reinforce over time after the crsies i.e., some firms race to the top by becoming more sustainability, while others race to the bottom by reducing ESG practices. My proposed research during my postdoctoral fellow aims to answer "why". Specifically, I will empirically examine more deeply about the mechanisms that drive such divergent spirals. For instance, firms that were highly criticized during global crises might face resource constraints and higher costs to invest in ESG as well as risk attacks of greenwashing from ESG investments, and thus they can benefit financially by shifting their resources away from ESG to invest in other strategic activities. Thus, public criticism, which aims to encourage organizational learning and reform, can have unintended effects by creating polarization across firms in our society today.The second stream (an individual-level) focuses on psychological mechanisms that drive behavioral reactions of individual stakeholders to firms' ESG practices, using field and online experiment methods. My proposed field experiment project is to examine how firms can communicate multiple goals (i.e., financial, puspose, and ESG) to motivate gig workers, and when and under what conditions communicating ESG can backfire i.e., leading to unintended effects such as making employees demotivated and thus lowering performance. I will conduct field experiments at NextOnc, a precision medicine startup (with remote work context) which I co-founded, by recruiting gig workers through online platforms.The insights from my proposed research will provide important implications to both academia and practice on how to anticipate and overcome such unintended consequences. For instance, my work can inform companies on how to most effectively engage in and communicate ESG practices as well as inform policy makers and regulators on how to scrutinize and work in partnership with firms to accelerate the diffusion of sustainability practices in our society.