ABSTRACT Green innovation is essential for achieving environmental sustainability and long‐term economic growth, particularly in emerging economies, such as China. Although prior research has highlighted the roles of governance mechanisms and external regulation, little is known about how chief executive officers' (CEO) psychological attachment to their organizations influences firm‐level green innovation. The current study draws on identity and agency theories in examining the effect of CEO organizational identification on firm‐level green innovation using Chinese listed firms from 2008 to 2022. By utilizing a novel quantitative measure of CEO organizational identification, we document a positive and significant association between CEO organizational identification and firm‐level green innovation. This relationship remains robust across alternative measures, model specifications, and multiple endogeneity controls, including Heckman selection models, system generalized method of moments, propensity score matching, and entropy balancing. Furthermore, the effect is more pronounced when environmental litigation risk is higher, audit quality is stronger, managerial ability is greater, and CEOs are older. Additional analyses show considerably strong effects in polluting firms and non‐state‐owned enterprises. Overall, this study identifies CEO organizational identification as an important yet overlooked driver of corporate green innovation.
Hussain et al. (Wed,) studied this question.