Leading the way to greening: aligning leadership styles and market learning for radical and incremental green innovation

Ali, Z, Qin, Z, Raza-Ullah, T ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8539-2992, Ali, A and Sherwani, M, 2025. Leading the way to greening: aligning leadership styles and market learning for radical and incremental green innovation. Business Strategy and the Environment. ISSN 0964-4733

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Abstract

The growing urgency of environmental challenges has intensified the need for green innovation (GI), comprising both radical (RGI) and incremental (IGI) forms. While RGI and IGI offer distinct pathways to sustainability—with RGI involving transformative, high-risk advancements, and IGI consisting of continuous, lower risk improvements—the literature has often overlooked their distinction. Drawing on upper echelons theory, we theorize how green entrepreneurial and green transformational leadership uniquely foster these innovation types, with the former aligning with RGI and latter supporting IGI. We further explicate how market learning—explorative and exploitative learning—interacts with leadership styles to shape GI outcomes. Using multisource data from matched responses of senior managers and CEOs across 315 firms in China, our findings based on hierarchical regression analysis support the hypotheses. Specifically, the findings reveal that firms with green entrepreneurial tend to adopt RGI than IGI, whereas firms with green transformational leadership are more likely to adopt IGI than RGI. Moreover, we find that green entrepreneurial leadership combined with explorative learning boosts RGI, while green transformational leadership paired with exploitative learning favors IGI. Overall, this study contributes by clarifying distinct roles of leadership in driving different GI outcomes and illuminating how market learning shapes these dynamics.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Business Strategy and the Environment
Creators:	Ali, Z., Qin, Z., Raza-Ullah, T., Ali, A. and Sherwani, M.
Publisher:	Wiley
Date:	19 June 2025
ISSN:	0964-4733
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1002/bse.70039 DOI 2502860 Other
Rights:	This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Ali, Z., Qin, Z., Raza‐Ullah, T., Ali, A., & Sherwani, M. (2025). Leading the way to greening: aligning leadership styles and market learning for radical and incremental green innovation. Business Strategy and the Environment, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.70039 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	07 Oct 2025 12:25
Last Modified:	07 Oct 2025 12:25
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54513

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