Research on Enterprises’ Intention to Adopt Green Technology Imposed by Environmental Regulations with Perspective of State Ownership

Environmental regulations (ER) affect enterprise behaviors. Nevertheless, whether the state ownership influences the relationship between environmental regulations and enterprises’ green intentions and behaviors need to be explored further. In this paper, the effects of environmental regulations on enterprises’ intentions to adopt green technologies, especially the moderating role of state ownership between environmental regulations and green technologic adoption intentions (GTAI), are proposed. An empirical study is carried out with the questionnaire data collected from 207 Chinese managers and executives in order to explore the influence of environmental regulations. With the perspective of ownership, the results confirm that the three kinds of environmental regulations (command-and-control (CAC), market-based incentives (MBI) and voluntary environmental (VER) regulations) have positive effects on enterprise green technology adoption intention. Furthermore, the state ownership of enterprise plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between command-and-control environmental regulations and green technology adoption intentions, but plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between voluntary environmental regulations and green technology adoption intentions. It generates no significant moderate effect on the relationship between market-based incentives environmental regulations and green technology adoption intentions. The work verifies that the differences of ownership would lead to varying effects on the intentions of enterprise green technology adoption imposed by regulations. Managerial implications, as well as the limitation of the work, are concluded at the end of this paper.