Conclusion and Limitations
Adopting GEO provides a critical approach for firms to gain a competitive advantage and enhance their performance. Drawing on a perspective of dynamic capabilities, this study indicates that GEO has positive influences on both environmental and financial performance. This study advances our understanding of GEO. It identifies the role of GEO as the dynamic capability in exploiting new ideas and encouraging innovativeness, catching potential opportunities, and taking risks in transforming the social economy into the social-ecological economy. Furthermore, the introduction of GTD and KTI stems from the same dimension, but two opposite forces. GTD is considered as a constraint to knowledge management capabilities, while KTI is accepted as a facilitator to strengthen knowledge management capabilities. The findings suggest that GTD negatively moderates the relationship between GEO and environmental performance. KTI positively moderates the relationship between GEO and environmental and financial performance. Adopting a stable environment facilitates greater environmental benefits from GEO than a context of technology turbulence. A process of intra-firm knowledge transfer and internal knowledge integration can help firms adopting GEO enhance two types of performance effectively and efficiently. There are several limitations need to be mentioned in future studies. First, GEO was assessed by a single informant and using self-reported data in each firm. Some critics believe that a potential bias may be generated. Although several remedial measures were taken and CMV is not an issue in this study, it may still exist. Further studies might evaluate the degree of GEO by connecting multiple answers of employees with managers
