How digitalization works in promoting corporate sustainable development performance? The mediating role of green technology innovation.

How does organizational digitalization enable enterprises to achieve sustainable development? To explore this question, in this paper, sustainable development performance is characterized by the corporate's financial performance and environmental performance respectively, and the intermediary role of green technology innovation is explored. Taking China's listed companies from 2011 to 2020 as the research sample, the empirical results suggest the following: (a) corporate digitalization positively affects corporate sustainability in terms of its financial performance and environmental performance; (b) exploratory green-tech innovation fully mediates the relationship between digitalization and corporate sustainability, while the exploitative counterpart partially mediates this relationship and negatively affects financial performance; (c) state-owned enterprises tend to improve environmental performance through digitalization accelerating green-tech innovation process, while non-state-owned enterprises pay more attention to financial performance. Moreover, enterprises in high-tech industries focus on both financial performance and environmental performance, while enterprises in non-high-tech industries emphasize environmental performance. Therefore, this research can be conducive for enterprises to make full use of digitalization and green technology innovation to achieve sustainable development including the improvement of financial performance and environmental performance.