Acquiescence or Redemption: CEO’s early-life experience of environmental pollution and corporate green innovation

The early-life experience of environmental pollution constitutes a prevalent negative encounter during a CEO's sensitive developmental period. However, its influence on a CEO's subsequent strategic decision-making, particularly regarding corporate green innovation, remains largely unexplored. Employing the perspectives of upper echelons theory, imprinting theory and trait activation theory, we propose that a CEO's early-life experience of environmental pollution significantly promotes green innovation within firms and such relationship could be activated by the effect of the CEO's pollution harm aversion. Furthermore, we posit that CEO's foreign experiences and the Confucianism circumstance may exert positively moderating effects, while institutional ownership might have a negative moderating impact on such a relationship. To test our hypotheses, a total of 344 listed private companies were selected as research subjects, and data on environmental pollution in CEOs' early-life residences were manually collected. Hierarchical regression was adopted as the analytic method, and the results largely support our hypotheses.