Linking entrepreneurial orientation to environmental collaboration: A stakeholder theory and evidence from multinational companies in an emerging market

Revisiting stakeholder theory as a potential theory of the firm giving rise to expectations about organizing, we analyze when and under what circumstances entrepreneurially-oriented firms increase their environmental collaboration with suppliers. Specifically, we investigate the association between entrepreneurial orientation and environmental collaboration with suppliers by accounting for the degree of employees’ work engagement and market environmental complexity as stakeholder-oriented moderators of this relationship. We test our hypotheses using multi-level analyses on 249 managers nested in 66 multinational companies in Turkey. We find that entrepreneurial orientation positively impacts environmental collaboration with suppliers. A high level of work engagement (as an organizing principle favoring a stakeholder focus) and a low level of market environment complexity (as an organizing principle favoring the customer as an instrumental stakeholder) moderates this linkage. We enrich the debate on entrepreneurial orientation, strategy, and environmental sustainability by providing logic rooted in stakeholder theory of the conditions under which multinational companies’ entrepreneurial orientation in emerging markets prioritizes and privileges environmental collaboration with suppliers.