Sustainability Attitudes, the Attitude–Behaviour Gap, and Business Competitiveness among Indigenous Oil and Gas Companies in Lagos State, Nigeria

Abstract

Sustainability rhetoric has become pervasive in the extractive industries, yet whether a sustainability-oriented mindset by itself confers competitive advantage — or only does so when converted into concrete practice — remains an open empirical question. Anchored on sustainable development theory and entrepreneurial orientation theory, this study examined the effect of sustainability attitude on the business competitiveness of indigenous oil and gas companies in Lagos State, Nigeria, and tested whether that effect survives when the behavioural dimensions of sustainable entrepreneurship — social innovation, green practices, and resource efficiency — are simultaneously controlled. The study adopted a positivist philosophy and a quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional survey design. A purposive technique was used to select five indigenous operators, reported here as Operators A to E, whose combined workforce of 2,571 employees formed the sampling frame; simple random sampling with proportional allocation was then applied to select respondents within each company. From a minimum sample of 346 obtained using the Yamane (1967) formula and inflated to 494 to accommodate a 30% attrition allowance, 417 valid responses were retrieved and analysed, an effective response rate of 84.4%. Simple regression revealed a weak but significant positive effect of sustainability attitude on business competitiveness (β = .141, t = 2.909, p = .004), explaining only 2.0% of its variance. However, when social innovation, green practices, and resource efficiency were entered simultaneously, the effect of sustainability attitude turned slightly negative and non-significant (β = −.025, t = −.529, p = .597). Suppression diagnostics confirmed that sustainability attitude is the only predictor whose sign reverses between the bivariate and multivariate estimates, indicating that its apparent
competitive value is largely explained by variance shared with the behavioural dimensions. The findings evidence a firm-level attitude–behaviour gap: sustainability attitude contributes to competitiveness only insofar as it is enacted through socially innovative and resource efficient behaviour, and confers no competitive premium of its own. The study recommends that
indigenous operators privilege verified sustainable conduct over declared sustainability orientation in strategy formulation, performance appraisal, and internal assurance.