**1. Introduction**

As stated in a 2022 report, the Chinese central government will go on improving the environment and promoting green development, ensuring greater harmony between humanity and the natural environment. Moreover, the central government has taken appropriate steps to encourage firms to combine scientific and technological innovation with green development to promote high-quality development [1]. Thus, in recent years, implementing green innovation to eliminate negative impacts on the environment has been seen as a vital source of competitive advantage [2]. Thus, the concept has attracted extensive attention from academic and practical circles [3]. Over the past several years, the public, employees, consumers, and other stakeholders have realized the importance of green innovation to society and the effects of firms' activities on the environment, which has driven more firms to engage in green innovation practices. Green innovation performance is the combination of green process innovation performance and green product innovation performance [4]. Different from traditional innovation performance, green innovation performance includes the twofold externalities of beneficial research and development overflow and environmental protection and may strengthen firms' competitive advantage and improve environmental quality [5]. However, due to limited resources and capabilities, a number of Chinese firms still show no great interest in participating in green innovation practices, which prevents them from improving their green innovation performance.

**Citation:** Ruan, R.; Chen, W.; Zhu, Z. Linking Environmental Corporate Social Responsibility with Green Innovation Performance: The Mediating Role of Shared Vision Capability and the Moderating Role of Resource Slack. *Sustainability* **2022**, *14*, 16943. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/su142416943

Academic Editors: Akrum Helfaya and Ahmed Aboud

Received: 18 November 2022 Accepted: 14 December 2022 Published: 17 December 2022

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Thus, it is vital to find factors that promote green innovation performance in the area of innovation studies.

Earlier studies have shown that integrating green customers and suppliers makes firms expand their green innovation search scope, which in turn improves green innovation performance [6]. Moreover, including green customers and green suppliers in green innovation can provide firms with more knowledge and expertise about novel ideas and technology that can help to coordinate information exchanges; thereby, green innovation performance can be improved [7]. Due to reciprocal interdependence benefits, firms can integrate green customers and suppliers in green innovation in order to gain their favor and obligation. For the sake of maintaining bilateral relationships, green customers and suppliers can also try to promote firms' green innovation performance [7,8]. Chen et al. [9] posited that green absorptive capacity—the ability to gain, absorb, transform, and use environmental knowledge—enables firms to efficiently integrate external and internal sources of extant and novel environmental knowledge. Moreover, Wang et al. [10] discovered that organizational green learning will encourage firms to gain more new environmental knowledge and improve their green innovation performance. Environmental corporate social responsibility enables firms to shift their focus from economic to environmental issues [11,12]. Thus, environmental corporate social responsibility may be an underlying predictor of green innovation performance. Environmental corporate social responsibility refers to firms' practices that combine environmental concerns with their competitive strategy, operations, commercial activities, and interactions with stakeholders beyond the narrow commercial profit and lawful requirements of the firms [13–15]. Prior studies have discussed the environmental corporate social responsibility outcomes at the firm level [16,17]. A number of studies highlight the impact of environmental corporate social responsibility on financial performance, firm value, and business performance [18–20]. Meanwhile, some studies also have explored the effect of environmental corporate social responsibility on innovation performance. On the basis of stakeholder theory, Bereskin et al. [21] proposed that environmental corporate social responsibility can cater to the expectations of stakeholders, which can help firms construct deeper relationships with their external stakeholders and extract critical resources from the network of relationships. The resources extracted from firms' stakeholders in turn improve firms' innovation performance. Wang and Zhang [22] posited that firms that shoulder environmental corporate social responsibility frequently invest heavily in adjacent fields to fund innovative research and development and product updates, which has a favorable influence on firms' innovation performance. Although the influence of environmental corporate social responsibility on firms' performance has attracted extensive academic attention [23], the environmental corporate social responsibility–green innovation performance relationship is still unclear.

Moreover, the underlying correlation mechanisms between environmental corporate social responsibility and firms' performance have not been illustrated thoroughly in extant research. Social identity theory provides a parsimonious framework that demonstrates how environmental corporate social responsibility may be correlated with green innovation performance. As stated in social identity theory, a perception of harmony between a group of employees can mean they perceive the destiny of the group as their own, which in turn can encourage them to take action to enhance their support for their organization [24,25]. Environmental corporate social responsibility highlights employees' engagement [26] and promotes the firm's vision, mission, and core values, which can easily spread and be shared across firms [27]. When employees perceive that they work for an environmentally responsible firm, they will the take initiative to participate in green product and process innovation via learning novel environmental knowledge and introducing and applying green and novel ideas to practices that aim at reducing energy consumption, preventing pollution, and protecting the environment [28]. Thereby, green innovation performance can be improved. As stated above, the study proposes that shared vision capability can be the mediator in the environmental corporate social responsibility-green innovation

performance relationship, which is aimed at clarifying the correlation mechanism between environmental corporate social responsibility and green innovation performance.

Studies have illustrated that the level of the environmental corporate social responsibility and firms' performance relationship can be divergent because they hinge on firms' resources such as adequate capital, human resource investment, and technology [29,30]. Resource slack can be described as the gap between the extracted resource demands of all groups in a firm and the real demands of the firm [31] and may also refer to the possibility that resources can be rearranged and transferred to achieve organizational goals [32]. The resource-based theory illustrates that the basis of firms' operations is resources and capabilities. Different resources and capabilities are critical for firms to maintain a sustainable competitive edge [33]. These resources and capabilities are usually of great value, rarity, imperfect imitability, and non-substitutability [34]. Firms with adequate slack resources will have great flexibility for the sustainable allocation of resources to engage in environmental corporate social responsibility practices, such as investing in green product research and development, saving energy on manufacturing processes, and preventing environmental pollution innovatively. Thereby, firms' green innovation performance can be promoted. However, due to a lack of slack resources, firms are often short of the financial, human, and technology resources to shoulder environmental responsibility, so green innovation performance is less likely to be improved. Furthermore, inadequate slack resources may hinder firms' ability to mobilize the needed resources that should be put into environmental corporate social responsibility practices, resulting in less green innovation performance. Thus, resource slack is thought to be a moderator in the environmental corporate social responsibility–green innovation performance relationship. It must be understood in order to clarify the boundary conditions of the effect of environmental corporate social responsibility on green innovation performance and to better understand when environmental corporate social responsibility is more or less related to green innovation performance.

The study is organized into six sections: Section 2 presents the theoretical framework and hypothesis development. Section 3 shows the research methodology and Section 4 reflects the data analysis results. Section 5 is a discussion of the findings. The last section provides the conclusions.

#### **2. Theoretical Framework and Research Hypotheses**

The study hypothesizes that there is a positive relationship between environmental corporate social responsibility and green innovation performance. Shared vision capability mediates the environmental corporate social responsibility–green innovation performance relationship. Furthermore, the impact of environmental corporate social responsibility on green innovation performance will be moderated by resource slack. The study illustrates the hypothesized relationships based on social identity theory and resource-based theory.
