Greenwashing Temptation: A Critical Examination of the Legal Approach against Greenwashing

The role of green communication is pivotal today to demonstrate the company’s commitment to sustainability. Corporate green communication is correlated to several positive effects which ultimately improve the firm’s financial performance. However, all these benefits can be also attained by engaging in greenwashing. Following the recent conceptualization of CSR as a form of regulation incorporating voluntary and mandatory norms (Sheehy, 2015), current greenwashing literature emphasises the need to extend regulation about green communication as a solution to reduce greenwashing (legal approach). In line with this approach, political actors and governments are introducing regulations against greenwashing occurrences. By combining the self-love concept (Rocha & Ghoshal, 2006) with the phenomenon of greenwashing, this conceptual paper challenges the legal approach against greenwashing as the only solution to counteract the phenomenon. A new concept emerges from the conceptual analysis: the Greenwashing Temptation (GT). The GT concept allows to understand that not only greenwashing is a phenomenon embedded in the profit-driven principle, but also the legal approach to counteract greenwashing implicitly assumes the supremacy of the profit-driven motivation. Based on a discussion about the effects of anti-greenwashing regulations on the GT, we propose here a different avenue that could discourage greenwashing by challenging its foundational reason. Instead of creating financial disincentives, we call for the urgency of promoting ethical thinking in management and marketing studies.