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激励。在我们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大流行的同时，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政治不稳定。虽然政府没有很好地运作，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，组织也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，尽管对公司可持续性的要求越来越高，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考察了利益相关者对公司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，并为公司和政策制定者提供了解决方案，以便做好准备并解决这些意想不到的问题。具体来说，我提出的研究包括两大主流，使用两种主要方法。第一个流（组织和行业层面）是利用全球公司环境、社会和治理（ESG）问题的档案数据进行定量实证研究。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，为什么一些公司积极响应并被激励为可持续发展，而另一些则没有）。例如，我的论文的一个章节发现了一个新现象，即在全球危机等复杂和不确定时期，公众对公司ESG实践的批评可能会造成公司反应的发散路径依赖螺旋，并在危机后随着时间的推移而加强，即一些公司通过变得更可持续而竞争到顶峰，而另一些公司则通过减少ESG实践而竞争到最低点。我在博士后期间提出的研究就是要回答“为什么”。具体来说，我将更深入地考察驱动这种不同螺旋的机制。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投资的“洗绿”风险攻击，因此他们可以通过将资源从ESG转移到其他战略活动中来获得经济利益。因此，旨在鼓励组织学习和改革的公众批评，可能会产生意想不到的影响，在我们今天的社会中，在公司之间造成两极分化。第二个流（个人层面）使用现场和在线实验方法，关注驱动个体利益相关者对公司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、目的和ESG）来激励零工员工，以及在什么时候、什么条件下传达ESG可能适得其反，即导致意想不到的影响，如使员工失去动力，从而降低绩效。我将在我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，通过在线平台招聘零工。我提出的研究的见解将对学术界和实践中如何预测和克服这些意想不到的后果提供重要的启示。例如，我的工作可以告诉公司如何最有效地参与和传播ESG实践，也可以告诉政策制定者和监管机构如何审查和与公司合作，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.