Green Innovation: The Roles of Green Inclusive Leadership, Green Knowledge and CSR Communication

Drawing upon the natural resource-based view (NRBV), organizational learning (OL), and contingency theories, we develop and test a theoretical framework that examines the impact of green inclusive leadership on green innovation. Our framework further examines the simple and serial mediation of green knowledge acquisition and sharing and the moderation of internal CSR communication. Using survey questionnaires, we collected multiwave data from 215 middle managers from different manufacturing and production organizations operating in Pakistan. The hypotheses were inspected using the PROCESS macro. According to the findings, green inclusive leadership and green innovation are positively associated, and green knowledge acquisition and green knowledge sharing are efficient serial mediators of this relationship. Further, the results suggest that internal CSR communication moderates the serial mediation such that the indirect relationship between green inclusive leadership and green innovation was stronger at high levels of internal CSR communication rather than at lower levels. Our research offers implications for manufacturing industry leaders and policymakers. By merging NRBV, OL, and contingency theories and drawing links across different genres of literature, our study provides unique insight into leadership, knowledge management, corporate communication, sustainability and CSR, and innovation.