Global business entities face the challenge of incremental pressures to restructure their strategic alignments and capabilities to be in accordance with the sustainable development initiatives of the United Nations. This study endeavours to investigate the mediating role of employees’ green motivations in the relationships of environmental ethics, the institutional environment, and managerial support with the green behaviour of companies in the Malaysian food manufacturing industry. Data were collected using a questionnaire survey completed by 230 respondents to achieve the study objectives. The respondents consisted of CEOs, company managers, marketing managers, human resources department managers, concerned authorities from environmental protection departments, and producers in the Malaysian food manufacturing industry. The study found that environmental ethics, the institutional environment and managerial support play significant roles in motivating employees’ green activities within organisations, while employees’ green motivation substantially contributes to the green behaviour of the company. This study also revealed that employees’ green motivation plays an important mediating role in the relationships of environmental ethics, the institutional environment, and managerial support with the green behaviour of the company. The implications of this study will be important for allowing governments to take instantaneous action for their climate change pledges to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) following the Paris Accord of 2015 and the Marrakech Proclamation of 2016.

The energy-growth nexus has important policy implications for economic development. The results from many past studies that investigated the causality direction of this nexus can lead to misleading policy guidance. Using data on China from 1953 to 2013, this study shows that an application of causality test on the time series of energy consumption and national output has masked a lot of information. The Toda-Yamamoto test with bootstrapped critical values and the newly proposed non-linear causality test reveal no causal relationship. However, a further application of these tests using series in different time-frequency domain obtained from wavelet decomposition indicates that while energy consumption Granger causes economic growth in the short run, the reverse is true in the medium term. A bidirectional causal relationship is found for the long run. This approach has proven to be superior in unveiling information on the energy-growth nexus that are useful for policy planning over different time horizons.