Yunfeng Ma

This study examines how gender, language, and operating conditions shape firms' environmental practices. We test whether female ownership and top management interact with linguistic future time reference (FTR) and with resource constraints such as power outages and internet disruptions. Female‐led firms report lower environmental engagement than male‐led firms, suggesting that communal and long‐term expectations associated with female leadership do not automatically translate into organizational behavior. In weak FTR contexts, where the future is perceived as close to the present, this gap narrows and can reverse. However, under resource constraints, this alignment erodes, as disruptions narrow managerial attention to immediate continuity and the benefit of weak FTR diminishes, leaving female‐led firms comparatively more penalized. Overall, the results indicate a conditional role congruity effect in which female leadership supports environmental practice when cultural frames favor intertemporal commitment but weakens when operational pressures elevate short‐term priorities.

This study investigates how linguistic structures shape corporate sustainability behavior by examining the relationship between future time reference (FTR) and firms' adoption of environmental management practices (EMPs). Drawing on discounting theory, we argue that in weak‐FTR languages, where the future does not require obligatory grammatical marking and can be expressed using present‐tense forms, speakers perceive the future as more proximate. This reduces temporal discounting and encourages long‐term orientations, thereby increasing the likelihood of environmental investments. Using World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data from over 220,000 firms across multiple industries, we find strong evidence that firms in weak‐FTR contexts are more likely to adopt EMPs. Yet, the effect varies across firms and sectors. Younger firms are more responsive than older firms, larger firms translate weak‐FTR influences more effectively into environmental action, and internationally oriented firms amplify the effect compared to domestically focused firms. Overall, the findings show that while linguistic structures shape intertemporal decision‐making, their impact on sustainability adoption depends on organizational characteristics and sectoral contexts. This highlights important boundary conditions for discounting theory and advances understanding of the behavioral foundations of corporate sustainability.