Cross-cultural examination of the normative impact of corporate environmental responsibility in Italy and China.

Organisations play a pivotal role in the eco-logical transition. Corporate EnvironmentalResponsibility (CER) encompasses voluntaryactions undertaken by companies to min-imise environmental impact during their oper-ations and to promote these efforts througheffective internal and external communication.Grounded in the Focus Theory of NormativeConduct, this research explores how injunc-tive and descriptive norms related to CER con-tribute to a collective sense of efficacy andcommitment to organisational environmentalissues, positively influencing attitudes andintentions toward simple (e.g. recycling, sus-tainable mobility) and challenging behaviours(e.g. acceptance of new energy technologies),both in the workplace and at home. Theresearch also investigates the impact of suchinjunctive and descriptive norms on specificindividual variables related to climate change,seeking to understand whether working in acontext that supports pro-environmental norms(and behaviours) can reduce feelings of stressand uncertainty related to climate change.Finally, the moderating role of norm tight-ness/looseness in influencing the relationshipsbetween CER norms (considered as indepen-dent variables) and outcome variables is anal-ysed. This study involves Italian and Chineseworkers (mainland China, Taiwan and HongKong) from public and private organisations.The research is a cross-sectional, correlationalstudy, and the relations between variables areanalysed through a path model. Any similari-ties and differences between the two samplesare investigated through multigroup analysis.Conducting a cross-cultural study concerningthese constructs is relevant because the inter-cultural (East-West) dimension may be crucialin increasing the generalizability of the study.In fact, in contexts such as China, where adher-ence to norms appears to be tighter than inWestern countries (Gelfand et al., 2011), it is interesting to understand whether the influence of these norms acts can be stronger. The results of the study will be discussed in light of both theoretical and practical relevance.