The influence mechanism of internal and external driving factors on corporate green behavior

•Explore the internal and external driving factors of enterprise green behavior.•Design the corresponding scale according to variable classification to carry out the investigation.•The mediating and moderating effects of green behavior and its categorical variables are tested.•Market leadership does not encourage companies to adopt green behaviors.•The regulatory intensity of green technology innovation is the highest of all variables. As the main undertaker of environmental protection tasks, what factors will affect the green behavior of enterprises and what factors play a crucial role are worthy of our in-depth research and discussion. This paper mainly explores the external and internal driving factors of enterprise green behavior, designs the corresponding scale, and obtains the enterprise survey data. With the help of SPSS26.0, AMOS24.0, and other software, the research results are analyzed through reliability and validity analysis difference score, and structural equation model to explore the influencing mechanism of enterprise green behavior. The empirical results show that: (1) From the perspective of direct effects, government environmental regulation, ecological environment quality, social norms, and individual factors have significant positive effects on corporate green behavior, while market leadership has no significant impact on corporate green behavior; From the perspective of categorical variables, government environmental regulation has a significant positive correlation with explicit green behavior, but its impact on implicit green behavior is not significant; market leadership has no significant impact on categorical variables of corporate green behavior; social norms also have a significant positive correlation with implicit green behavior, but their impact on explicit green behavior is not significant. (2) From the perspective of mediating effect, there are also multiple chain mediating effects between government environmental regulation, corporate green behavior, and their categorical variables. Individual factors mediate between market leadership, corporate green behavior, and its categorical variables. Ecological environment quality and individual factors significantly mediate between social norms, corporate green behavior, and its categorical variables. In contrast, individual factors significantly mediate between ecological environment quality and corporate green behavior and its categorical variables. (3) From the perspective of