Corporate sustainability: Impact factors on organizational innovation in the industrial area

In recent years, the principle of sustainability has received increasing attention in corporate governance, and corporate sustainability is usually achieved through organizational innovation. The purpose of this study is to identify the factors that are critical for companies to influence organizational innovation when promoting Industry 4.0. Our research analyzes the relationship between these factors and Industry 4.0, human resources, and corporate sustainability to investigate organizational innovation and its formative factors against the backdrop of the new industrial era. Integrating partial least squares-structured equation modeling (PLS-SEM), bootstrapping, and other methods, we discover that for companies focusing on promoting Industry 4.0, the most important organizational innovation that affects sustainability is influenced by customer orientation, organizational culture, and leadership style in descending order of influence. Meanwhile, knowledge integration capability (KIC) is more important than knowledge absorptivity. It indicates that in the promotion of Industry 4.0, the trend of sustainability led by the leaders is fading, and the customer-driven trend will become more and more obvious in the future.