Effects of Proactive Market Orientation and Environmental Commitment on Export Performance: Empirical Evidence from Korea

Effects of Proactive Market Orientation and Environmental Commitment on Export Performance: Empirical Evidence from Korea

As environmental regulation has been consistently accepted worldwide and its spillover effects on export manufacturing firms are increasing, environmental issues are becoming extremely critical especially to the survival of export manufacturing firms. Thus, it is necessary for exporters to try to cope with the situation by actively collecting environmental information about the export market and committing to respond to environmental issues systematically in the long term. Against this backdrop, this study aims to analyze the effects of proactive market orientation and environmental commitment on the export performance of export manufacturing firms. The mediation effect of environmental commitment and the moderating effect of a competitive market situation were also investigated. For the empirical study, 400 questionnaires were given out. Of that number, 217 were collected, of which 196 were valid. The analyses were performed using the Smart-PLS 2.0 statistical program. The results are summarized as follows. First, a proactive market orientation has a positive effect on environmental commitment. Second, environmental commitment has a significant impact on export performance. Third, a proactive market orientation has no directly significant influence on export performance. Fourth, environmental commitment has a complete mediation effect between proactive market orientation and the export performance path. Fifth, a competitive market situation has no moderating effect in this model.