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

我对企业可持续发展的研究是由我们面临的重大问题推动的。尽管我们正面临前所未有的气候变化和日益加剧的不平等，并仍在应对COVID大流行，但俄罗斯-乌克兰战争以令人心碎的方式凸显了人权危机和极端的政治不稳定。虽然政府运作不佳，但我相信企业可以站出来，带头大规模解决世界问题。在过去的几十年里，各组织还面临着来自不同利益攸关方群体的越来越大的压力，要求它们参与可持续性实践。然而，尽管对企业可持续性的需求不断增长，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，社会向可持续性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探讨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外后果，并为企业和政策制定者做好充分准备和解决这些意外问题提供了解决方案。具体而言，我的研究主要包括两个方向，并使用两种方法。第一个方向（组织和产业层面）是使用全球企业的环境、社会和治理（ESG）问题的档案数据进行定量实证研究。我建议的研究探讨利益相关者如何看待和评估公司的ESG战略，以及公司如何应对。这些见解将揭示推动企业参与ESG实践的关键因素（即，为什么有些公司积极响应并有动力实现可持续发展，而另一些公司则不然）。例如，我的论文中的一章发现了一个新现象，即在复杂和不确定的时期（如全球危机），公众对公司ESG实践的批评可以创造公司反应的不同路径依赖螺旋，并在危机后随着时间的推移而加强，即，一些公司通过提高可持续性来达到顶峰，而另一些公司则通过减少ESG实践来达到谷底。我在博士后研究期间提出的研究旨在回答“为什么”。具体来说，我将更深入地实证研究驱动这种不同螺旋的机制。例如，在全球危机期间受到严厉批评的公司可能面临资源限制和更高的环境、社会和治理投资成本，以及环境、社会和治理投资的"漂绿"攻击风险，因此，它们可以通过将资源从环境、社会和治理转移到投资于其他战略活动而获得经济利益。因此，在当今社会，以组织学习和改革为目的的舆论批评，可能会在企业间产生两极分化，从而产生意想不到的效果。第二种观点（个人层面），通过现场实验和网络实验，研究影响企业ESG实践的利益相关者个体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沟通多个目标（即，金融，puspose，和ESG），以激励零工工人，以及何时以及在何种条件下传达ESG可能适得其反，即，从而导致诸如使员工失去动力并因此降低绩效的非预期效果。我将在NextOnc进行实地实验，NextOnc是我与人共同创立的一家精准医疗初创公司（具有远程工作背景），通过在线平台招募零工。我提出的研究的见解将为学术界和实践界提供重要的启示，即如何预测和克服这种意想不到的后果。例如，我的工作可以告知公司如何最有效地参与和沟通ESG实践，并告知政策制定者和监管机构如何审查并与公司合作，以加速可持续发展实践在我们社会中的传播。

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.