How Do Organizational Empowerment and Management Control Jointly Promote ESG Value Co-Creation? A Longitudinal Case Study of Haier Smart Home Based on Public Disclosures

Abstract

As sustainability disclosure becomes increasingly institutionalized in China, the managerial challenge is shifting from whether firms disclose ESG information to how ESG objectives are translated into executable, accountable, and measurable operating responsibilities. Prior research has mainly examined the economic consequences of ESG performance, while less attention has been paid to how empowerment and management control work together in decentralized organizations. This study conducts a longitudinal documentary single-case analysis of Haier Smart Home based on public disclosures. The period from 2005 to 2019 is treated as the organizational background, while the analysis focuses on the integration of ESG governance and operating management from 2020 to 2025. The findings suggest that the Rendanheyi-related arrangements of delegated authority, platform-based resource access, and value orientation provide organizational conditions for bringing ESG issues closer to business settings, although public disclosures do not directly establish changes in employees' psychological empowerment. More importantly, Haier Smart Home has increasingly translated selected ESG objectives into operating responsibilities through board oversight, cross-functional ESG structures, target decomposition, and performance incentives. Its 2024 ESG report, for example, discloses that selected ESG indicators are incorporated into monthly performance assessment and that recovery, dismantling, and regeneration targets in the resource-recycling business are linked to executive evaluation and compensation. Supply-chain management and appliance recycling further indicate that ESG tasks extend beyond firm boundaries, but the available evidence does not identify the net causal effect of platform mechanisms on ESG outcomes. Double materiality, metric definitions, and data verification constitute control boundaries for decentralized action, while sustainable finance indicates a possible, rather than established, resource-feedback mechanism. Based on these findings, the study proposes a project-level ESG Win-Win Value-Added Statement integrating responsibility ownership, baselines and boundaries, inputs, physical outputs, financial outcomes, environmental and social impacts, and verification status. The study contributes by integrating organizational empowerment and management control within a single accountability-oriented framework and by explicitly defining the evidentiary limits of a disclosure-based case study.