“Environmental Dividend”or “Cognitive Trap” ? —The Impact of Executive Environmental Perception on Corporate Strategic Greenwashing and Long-Term Value

Sustainable development has become a guiding principle in addressing global ecological and environmental challenges.As the primary actors in implementing green and low-carbon transition strategies,enterprises play a decisive role in determining whether national economies can achieve their green transformation goals.While environmental information disclosure is widely recognized as a key mechanism for evaluating corporate environmental performance,some firms engage in strategic greenwashing—employing symbolic actions such as selective disclosure to construct a “green” image without substantive environmental improvements.This practice not only undermines the credibility of environmental information but also poses long-term risks to corporate development and societal green transition.Existing literature has examined the drivers of greenwashing from both external factors such as institutional pressures and internal factors such as corporate governance,yet insufficient attention has been paid to executive environmental perception as a critical variable at the strategic decision-making level.Moreover,prior findings on the relationship between executive environmental perception and corporate environmental performance are contradictory,suggesting that the relationship between executive environmental perception and strategic greenwashing may be nonlinear. Drawing on Upper Echelons Theory,our study constructs a “cognition—behavior—outcomes” analytical framework. Within the framework of executive environmental perception,strategic greenwashing decisions require strong information-processing capabilities to anticipate market reactions,navigate regulatory boundaries,and assess the risks of information manipulation,while simultaneously conducting cost-benefit trade-offs. As environmental perception dynamically evolves,executives' information-processing capabilities and decision-making frameworks undergo structural transformations. We propose a U-shaped relationship between executive environmental perception and strategic greenwashing,and further posit that this relationship is mediated through four channels:digital transformation,media attention,green technology innovation,and managerial myopia.Using a panel dataset of 1,290 non-financial A-share listed companies in China from 2009 to 2024,our study employs a two-way fixed effects model to empirically test the U-shaped relationship between executive environmental perception and strategic greenwashing,and further examines the economic consequences of strategic greenwashing on corporate long-term value. The empirical findings reveal the following results:①There is a significant U-shaped relationship between executive environmental perception and strategic greenwashing,indicating that enhanced environmental perception initially inhibits but subsequently exacerbates strategic greenwashing. This U-shaped relationship is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises,non-heavy-polluting industries,and firms whose executives have financial backgrounds,and the core conclusion remains robust across a series of robustness checks including sample restriction alternation,core explanatory variable substitution,and mitigating the confounding effects of national macroeconomic policies. ②Approximately 81.56% of sample firms are located to the left of the inflection point,suggesting that at the current stage,executive environmental perception in Chinese firms still plays a predominantly beneficial “environmental dividend” role. ③The mechanism analysis reveals that digital transformation and media attention exhibit U-shaped mediating effects,both of which are easily exploited as greenwashing tools at high environmental perception levels; conversely,green technology innovation and managerial myopia exhibit inverted U-shaped mediating effects,of which only substantive green innovation can genuinely improve corporate environmental performance while symbolic innovation merely provides content for strategic greenwashing. ④The economic consequence analysis verifies the “short-term gains,long-term losses” paradox:while strategic greenwashing enhances firms’ market valuation in the short run,it exacerbates abnormal fluctuations in revenue growth rates over the long term,ultimately impairing corporate growth. Our study makes three marginal contributions. First,from a research perspective,it extends Upper Echelons Theory to a nonlinear framework by uncovering the U-shaped relationship between executive environmental perception and strategic greenwashing,thereby reconciling contradictory findings in prior literature. Second,it establishes a comprehensive “cognition—behavior—outcomes” analytical framework that systematically examines four transmission channels and the economic consequences of strategic greenwashing,providing a holistic understanding of the entire causal chain. Third,based on long-term panel data and textual analysis methodologies,it offers robust empirical evidence and practical insights for greenwashing governance. The findings yield the following policy implications:①Regulatory authorities should establish graded and dynamic differentiated supervision systems to accurately identify and intervene in the “trap” risks of executive environmental perception. ②Corporate decision-makers should implement checks-and-balances mechanisms and shift evaluation metrics from input-based indicators toward outcome-based indicators to prevent environmental perception advantages from being transformed into greenwashing tools. ③It is essential to focus on the heterogeneous effects of executives' environmental cognition on greenwashing behavior and to implement differentiated guiding strategies for greenwashing governance.