National Culture and Corporate Environmental Strategy: Uncertainty Avoidance, Future Orientation, and Green Revenue Target

Abstract

This study examines whether GLOBE societal-practice measures of national culture predict corporate green revenue target setting, a rare, forward-looking disclosure with a 0.21% base rate in our sample. We estimate logistic regressions on 73,501 firm-year observations from 10,544 firms headquartered in 48 countries over 2002-2024, using LSEG (Refinitiv) ESG and financial data, GLOBE scores, and World Bank accounts, testing whether uncertainty avoidance and future orientation predict disclosure of a green revenue share target. Contrary to our hypothesis, uncertainty avoidance is significantly and negatively associated with disclosure (β = -3.574, p = .035), while future orientation is positively associated but only at the 10% level (β = 3.538, p = .054). Both results survive a linear probability model, a year-trend control, a random-intercept multilevel logit, and Firth's penalized-likelihood estimator. A formal interaction test shows both cultural effects differ in Japan and South Korea, which together account for 77% of the 155 disclosures observed (joint Wald χ²(2) = 22.01, p < .001); neither coefficient differs from zero once these two countries are excluded. The findings caution against treating GLOBE scores as uniform predictors of environmental target setting: country-specific institutional or regulatory dynamics more plausibly drive the association than any shared cultural mechanism.