Research highlights the increasing engagement of SMEs in adopting sustainable practices to enhance their sustainable performance. This paper extends the current literature on sustainable manufacturing practices (SMPs) and SMEs’ sustainable performance by examining the mediating effect of competitive capabilities and the moderating impact of environmental regulation. Structured questionnaires were used to collect data from 288 manufacturing SMEs in China. Research findings using structural equation modeling with partial least squares (PLS-SEM) revealed that adopting SMPs enables SMEs to gain competitive capabilities and to positively influence their sustainable performance. In addition, gaining competitive capabilities have a positive mediating impact on the relationship between SMPs and SMEs’ sustainable performance. Further, the interaction between SMPs and environmental regulation strengthens SMEs’ sustainable performance. At the end of this paper, a set of concluding remarks and implications is drawn.

Green initiative-taking, an employee’s self-starting opportunity-seeking action to improve environmental performance is a desirable outcome of organizations’ green policies. Given prior inattention to this area of study, it is unclear what fosters green initiative-taking, and why. This study attempts to answer these questions using a mixed-methods approach. First, an exploratory qualitative study was conducted. Green human resource management, eco-silence, supervisor bottom-line mentality, and co-worker voice emerged as the major themes of employees’ experiences when seeking to engage in green initiative-taking. Second, building on social information processing and social learning theories, a quantitative study proposes a conceptual model of the inter-relationships between the themes that emerged from the first study. Results from a multinational multisource time-lagged quantitative study support most of the hypotheses and shed light on avenues for future research. It suggests that supervisor bottom-line mentality inhibiting green initiative-taking might be standard procedure bottom-line mentality rather than profit bottom-line mentality. Post-hoc, to enhance the study’s applicability, a fuzzy-set analysis was conducted to offer managers the configurations that best yield green initiative-taking among hospitality employees.