Against the backdrop of sustainable development, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies have become an important source of firms’ long-term competitive advantage. Despite increasingly convergent regulatory frameworks, firms display substantial heterogeneity in ESG implementation. As key decision-makers, CEOs’ decision horizons may shape ESG strategies by influencing time expectations, incentives, and decision capacity. Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2013 to 2023, this study examines how CEOs’ decision horizons affect the pace and rhythm of ESG advancement and further investigates the mediating role of CEO decision power. The results show that longer CEO decision horizons significantly slow the pace of ESG advancement while promoting a more stable implementation rhythm. Further analysis reveals a suppression effect of CEO decision power: longer decision horizons weaken CEO decision power, which partly offsets the negative effect on ESG pace and attenuates the positive effect on ESG rhythm. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that these effects vary across top management team stability, financing constraints and regional environmental regulation. By introducing a temporal perspective, this study enriches ESG research and upper echelons theory and offers implications for CEO tenure management, corporate governance, and differentiated regulation.
Zeng et al. (Thu,) studied this question.