Environmental Responsibility Perception and Corporate Green Strategy: The Conditional Moderating Role of Organizational Resilience and the Limited Mediating Effect of ESG Governance

Abstract

Grounded in environmental psychology and social identity theory, this study investigates the psychological mechanisms through which managerial environmental responsibility perception (ERP) drives corporate green strategy (GS). Environmental psychology research has established that pro-environmental behavior is fundamentally driven by cognitive-affective processes, yet the application of these principles to organizational strategic behavior remains underdeveloped. This study conceptualizes ERP as a multidimensional psychological construct encompassing cognitive awareness of environmental issues, affective concern reflecting emotional responses, and conative readiness representing behavioral intentions. Based on panel data comprising 2,058 firm-year observations from 382 Chinese A-share listed companies during 2018-2023, two-way fixed effects models with cluster-robust standard errors and 5,000-iteration Bootstrap mediation analysis were employed. Results indicate that ERP significantly promotes GS (β = 0.0134, p < 0.01), confirming that managerial environmental cognition serves as the primary psychological driver of organizational sustainability transformation. In heavy-polluting industries where environmental identity salience is elevated, the effect magnitude increases by 2.05 times, providing empirical support for social identity amplification mechanisms. Organizational resilience exhibits a conditional moderation effect, indicating that collective efficacy resources function as a necessary yet insufficient condition for perception-to-action translation. Furthermore, the direct cognitive-behavioral pathway assumes predominance (92.2%), substantially exceeding the ESG-mediated institutional channel (7.8%), revealing that authentic environmental cognition bypasses formal governance mechanisms to directly drive strategic behavior. This study extends environmental psychology from individual behavior to organizational strategy, demonstrating that managerial psychological processes fundamentally shape corporate sustainability outcomes.