From Capabilities to Competitive Greening: Managerial Commitment and Green Shared Vision as Serial Mediators in Energy‐Sector SMEs

ABSTRACT Drawing on dynamic capabilities view and upper echelons theory, this study shows how energy‐sector SMEs convert dynamic capabilities into green competitive advantage. We theorize that sensing–seizing–reconfiguring routines are associated with green competitive advantage only when top managers visibly prioritize environmental goals and foster a shared understanding of green priorities, giving rise to a behavioural–cognitive cascade from managerial commitment to a green shared vision. Cross‐sectional survey data from 160 Polish energy‐sector SMEs and Hayes's serial‐mediation procedure (Model 6 with bootstrapping) indicate that dynamic capabilities have no statistically significant direct association with green competitive advantage; instead, their association with advantage appears to be channelled fully and sequentially through managerial commitment and green shared vision, and this pattern is robust to alternative model specifications. The paper contributes by (1) refining the dynamic capabilities view in the environmental domain, showing that dynamic capabilities behave as ‘potential’ that requires activation through people‐centric mechanisms; (2) integrating capabilities and upper echelons perspectives by specifying managerial commitment and green shared vision as behavioural microfoundations that connect capability deployment to competitive greening; and (3) specifying boundary conditions for when and where dynamic capabilities pay off by situating the analysis in tightly regulated, capital‐constrained energy SMEs undergoing green transition.