Organizational Environmental Sustainability in Asian Countries: Assessment and Nomological Network

Abstract

This dissertation recognizes that organizations and their employees are vital for addressing climate change and promoting environmental sustainability. It presents a comprehensive examination of organizations’ environmental sustainability performance for far and southeastern Asian organizations, focusing on actions (i.e., what organizations do). Five studies are presented which adopt an initiative-based approach to assess organizational environmental performance, develop NLP methods to content analyze environmental sustainability initiatives, and validate the assessment by examining its nomological network. The first study utilized natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to facilitate the human coding process in the content-analysis of environmental sustainability initiatives. Study two implemented a human-machine hybrid approach to quantify organizations’ environmental performance by content analyzing their initiatives reported in their 2018 corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Environmental performance of 859 Asian organizations were compared across eleven major Asian countries/regions (China Mainland, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam). An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to examine the factor structure of company environmental performance in this region, which suggested a bi-factor structure with a general factor and three group factors. Study three examined and demonstrated the convergent and discriminant validities of companies’ initiative-based environmental performance with third-party Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings. Study four investigated the relationship between top management (CEO and board of directors) characteristics and organizations’ environmental performance. Finally, study five analyzed the relationships between organization environmental performance and financial performance. Together, these studies constitute the first in depth, psychologically informed, and quantitatively sophisticated investigations of pro-environmental organizational actions in Asia. The findings stand to inform the literature of organizational environmental sustainability in general, and in Asian organizations in particular.