The impact of corporate support programs on environmental and social innovation: Empirical insights from the food and beverage industry

Purpose- We analyze the influence of corporate support programs on managers’ environmental and social innovation behaviors. To offer a more comprehensive understanding of these relationships, we also account for the moderating role of technological reflectiveness and business moral values. Design/methodology/approach- We adopt a scenario-based experimental study to test the impact of corporate support programs on environmental and social innovation behaviors. After running a pre-test to verify the effectiveness of alternative scenarios through 100 respondents with managerial experience residing in the UK and EU countries, we collected data from a sample of 220 senior managers of firms from the Australian food and beverage industry for the main study. We used one-way ANOVA with Dunnett’s test to investigate direct relationships and the PROCESS Model to test the moderating role of technological reflectiveness and business moral values. Findings- Our findings reveal time provision, budget provision, and advice provision as salient forms of corporate support programs that positively impact managers’ environmental and social innovation behaviors. We find that technological reflectiveness positively moderates the link between time provision and managers’ social innovation behavior and negatively moderates the link between advice provision and managers’ social innovation behavior. Furthermore, we find that business moral values positively moderate the relationships between time and budget provisions and managers’ environmental innovation behavior and between budget and advice provisions and managers’ social innovation behavior. Originality/value- We contribute to innovation and operations management research by adopting a behavioral operations management perspective and empirically analyzing the influences of managers’ technological reflectiveness and business moral values on the relationship between organizational corporate support programs and managers’ environmental and social innovation behavior in the context of the food and beverage industry.