Abstract:    As governments and the public pay more and more attention to the environmental pollution of enterprises, how to balance environmental protection and economic benefits has become an important challenge for the sustainable development of enterprises. As one of the important ways for enterprises to achieve the balance of environmental benefits and economic benefits, green innovation has become a hot topic in academic circles. However, most of the existing researches focus on the influence of external factors on green innovation of enterprises, while there are fewer researches on internal factors. Upper echelons theory provides a possible way to explore the influencing factors of green innovation from the internal perspective of enterprise. According to this theory, the differences in cognitive basis and values brought by the heterogeneity of executive team will affect the decision-making of the team, and then influence the strategic choice and innovation performance of enterprises.This paper takes the panel data of 927 A-share listed manufacturing enterprises from 2015 to 2019 as samples to explore the impact of heterogeneity of executive team on enterprise green innovation performance, and introduces corporate environmental strategy as an intermediary variable to further dissect the influence mechanism. In the specific research design, on the one hand, this paper focuses on the task-oriented heterogeneity in executive team heterogeneity, including the heterogeneity of tenure and functional background. On the other hand, green innovation is divided into green technology innovation and green management innovation, and it constructs an empirical model containing two explanatory variables, two explanatory variables and mediating variables.The research finds that: (1) The tenure heterogeneity of executive team has a significant positive effect on green management innovation, and the functional background heterogeneity of executive team has a significant positive effect on green technology innovation and green management innovation. The reason is that the differences among team members can effectively make up for the adverse effects of rigid thinking and emotional dependence on business decisions, so that the executive team can maintain enthusiasm and motivation for green innovation activities. (2) The corporate environmental strategy plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between tenure heterogeneity and functional background heterogeneity of executive team and green innovation. Executive team heterogeneity can make the team more sensitive to identify environmental risks, so as to adopt proactive environmental strategies, and finally improve the green innovation performance of enterprises. (3) It is also noted that the tenure heterogeneity of executive team has no significant effect on green technology innovation. Executives with shorter tenure are more receptive to external knowledge and more likely to take corresponding innovative measures than those with longer tenure. Therefore, when the tenure of executive team members tends to be shorter, it may significantly promote green technology innovation, which may be one of the reasons why tenure heterogeneity has no significant effect on green technology innovation.The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows: first, it enriches the research related to the influencing factors of corporate green innovation, and validates and extends the research logic of the influence of executive team characteristics on organizational output; second, it responds to the view that the characteristics of the executive team may indirectly affect the green innovation of enterprises, and empirically tests the classic theoretical model that the characteristics of the management team in the upper echelons theory can affect the performance of enterprises through strategic choice.At the end of this paper, it concludes with some managerial insights that may help China′s listed manufacturing cooperates′ green innovation practices based on the findings of the study, including: moderately strengthening the recruitment of new executives, absorbing staff with experience in different functions into the executive team, and elevating the emphasis on environmental issues to the corporate strategy level.

Key words: executive team heterogeneity, green innovation performance, corporate environmental strategy