Can proactive boundary‐spanning search enhance green innovation? The mediating role of organizational resilience

Abstract Green innovation is critical for firms' sustainable development, and its antecedents have attracted extensive attention. However, how proactive boundary‐spanning search enhances firms' green innovation remains unclear. Building on the resource‐based view and dynamic capabilities theory, we explore the impact of proactive boundary‐spanning search on firms' green innovation and investigate the mediating role of two types of organizational resilience. Survey data are collected from 218 manufacturing firms in China, and hierarchical regression and bootstrap analysis are used to test hypotheses. The results demonstrate that proactive boundary‐spanning search not only has an inverted U‐shaped relationship with radical green innovation and incremental green innovation, but also has an inverted U‐shaped relationship with precursor resilience and improvisation resilience. Moreover, the results show that precursor resilience and improvisation resilience partially mediate the inverted U‐shaped relationship between proactive boundary‐spanning search and the two types of green innovation. This research reveals the nonlinear relationship between proactive boundary‐spanning search and green innovation, which enriches the research of green innovation by considering organizational resilience.