Earticle

초록

영어

This study asks when sustainability strategy stops adding value inside the firm. ESG has moved beyond a means of securing external legitimacy to become a strategic standard that governs how organizations operate. Yet for strategy to translate into performance, employees must first accept and internalize it, and prior research has implicitly assumed that this internalization proceeds at a constant rate across organizations. Drawing on signalling theory and substitutes logic, we argue that ESG perceptions function as a strategic signal conveying organizational responsibility and trustworthiness, and that the signal becomes redundant, losing its incremental effect, in organizations where the employment relationship already delivers the same message. Using survey data from 308 employees of Korean firms, we specify a path in which ESG perceptions reach task performance through job satisfaction and test whether cooperative labor-management relations, an institutional resource at the organizational level, and leader-member exchange (LMX), a relational resource at the dyadic level, moderate the first stage of that path. ESG perceptions predicted job satisfaction, which in turn predicted task performance, and the indirect effect was significant. Cooperative labor-management relations negatively moderated the relationship between ESG perceptions and job satisfaction, and a Johnson-Neyman floodlight analysis located the boundary at 4.18 on a five-point scale, above which the effect of ESG perceptions was statistically indistinguishable from zero; 35.7% of respondents worked above this threshold. LMX produced no comparable substitution effect. By demonstrating that the internal effect of sustainability strategy is not universal but is conditioned at the institutional level of the employment relationship, this study introduces signal redundancy as a boundary condition in research on strategy implementation. It also refines substitutes theory by proposing a referent-matching account in which substitution arises only between signals that share the same referent.

목차

ABSTRACT
I. Introduction
II. Theoretical Background and Hypotheses
2.1 Sustainability Strategy and Employees’ ESG Perceptions
2.2 Redundancy of Strategic Signals: The Substitution Logic
2.3 Cooperative Labor-Management Relations as an Institutional Substitute
2.4 LMX as a Possible Dyadic Substitute
III. Research Method
3.1 Sample and Data Collection
3.2 Measures
3.3 Analytical Procedures
IV. Results
4.1 Validity of the Measurement Model
4.2 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations
4.3 Hypothesis Testing
4.4 Locating the Threshold: Floodlight Analysis
4.5 Robustness Checks
V. Conclusion
5.1 Summary of Findings
5.2 Theoretical Implications
5.3 Practical Implications
5.4 Limitations and Directions for Future Research
References

키워드

저자

• Dae-Il Kim [ General Manager, HR Team, Pusan New Port Co., Ltd. ] Corresponding Author

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  산업혁신연구 [The Journal of Industrial Innovation]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  2005-2936

• eISSN

  2800-0080

• 수록기간

  1985~2026

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 325 DDC 658