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Journal of Business Ethics

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03.01.2018 | Original Paper

Do Firms’ Slack Resources Influence the Relationship Between Focused Environmental Innovations and Financial Performance? More is Not Always Better

verfasst von: Dante I. Leyva-de la Hiz, Vera Ferron-Vilchez, J. Alberto Aragon-Correa

Erschienen in: Journal of Business Ethics | Ausgabe 4/2019

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Abstract

Environmental research has usually highlighted that the existence of slack resources in an organization helps allocate investment to innovative initiatives. However, the existing literature has paid very limited attention to how slack resources can influence the effects of focused and diversified innovations in different ways. Agency theory scholars claim that a manager’s first preference when confronted with discretionary resources will not generate positive investments for the firm, but their own opportunistic preferences. The differences between focused and diversified environmental innovations allow us to gain a better understanding of the financial impact of being focused and how slack resources matter in this context. We analyze a longitudinal sample of 5845 environmental patents from the 75 largest companies in the electrical components and equipment industry worldwide. Our results show that high levels of slack resources reduce the existing positive relationship between focused environmental innovations and a firm’s financial performance. These results contribute to delineating the theoretical and empirical implications of focused versus diversified environmental innovations and extend the literature on ethical dilemmas concerning managers’ use of slack resources in the firm.

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While agency theory offers an appropriate framework for explaining our results, we acknowledge that they are consistent with several alternative interpretations. Thus, we have included them in our discussion section. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

This sector is numbered 6190 in the COMPUSTAT database.

Since this variable may be subject to outliers, we corrected it through the winsorizing approach (Dixon 1980). We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

A patent is “a legal title that protects a technical invention for a limited period. It gives the owner the right to prevent others from exploiting the invention in the countries for which it has been granted” (EPO 2010: 8).

According to the GPI User Manual, the same application can be filed in different countries and thus can be published by several authorities. These publications have similar content, and together form a simple patent family. When filtering one representative per family, we ensure that the same patent does not appear several times.

The innovation literature has used the term “patent portfolio race” to mean that companies apply for a patent as soon as possible, right after the innovation is developed, i.e., there is no time lapse between generating an innovation and filing a patent application (for further detail, see Hall and Ziedonis 2001; Hegde et al. 2009; Joshi and Nerkar 2011).

We want to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

We thank an anonymous reviewer for noting this future research line.

We wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

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Titel: Do Firms’ Slack Resources Influence the Relationship Between Focused Environmental Innovations and Financial Performance? More is Not Always Better
verfasst von: Dante I. Leyva-de la Hiz
Vera Ferron-Vilchez
J. Alberto Aragon-Correa
Publikationsdatum: 03.01.2018
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Journal of Business Ethics / Ausgabe 4/2019
Print ISSN: 0167-4544
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0697
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3772-3

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