Does intrinsic motivation or extrinsic pressure matter more? An exploratory study of small businesses going green and innovation

Small firms may go green because of intrinsic motivation (to realise their green values) or extrinsic pressure (to satisfy the requirements of stakeholders). While the impacts of these two motivations on firms' green behaviours have been discussed in the literature, their influences on economic behaviours such as innovation remain unclear. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between going green due to intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations and their impact on firms' innovation. We examine a dataset of almost 21,000 small businesses in 39 countries, primarily less developed, from 2018 to 2020. We find that firms going green tend to be more innovative than those that do not. Also, firms going green due to extrinsic pressure are equally innovative as those that do so for intrinsic motivation. In some cases, it is even found that extrinsic pressure exerts a stronger effect on innovation than intrinsic motivation. Moreover, we examine the moderating effects of market competition on the relationship between green motivation and innovation. We find that while competition exerts no effect on the relationship between intrinsic motivation to go green and firm innovation, it strengthens the relationship between extrinsic motivation to go green and firm innovation. Our findings are robust in different empirical settings that control for endogeneity, model specifications and estimators.