<p>While growing attention has been paid to top management team (TMT) environmental awareness as a driver of green innovation, how this awareness interacts dynamically with institutional pressures to shape firms’ ethical engagement in radical, sustainability-oriented innovation remains unclear. To address this gap, we extend upper echelons theory by developing a dynamic and pressure-based framework that incorporates coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures as evolving moderators. Using panel data from 2011 to 2023 of Chinese listed manufacturing firms, we find that TMT environmental awareness significantly promotes radical green innovation, reflecting executives’ enduring ethical and strategic commitment to sustainability. Institutional pressures exhibit temporal asymmetry: in the short term, they constrain this positive effect, but over time, they evolve into enabling forces. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that, under institutional pressures, firms led by CEOs with innovation experience tend to weaken their engagement in radical green innovation in the short term, but strengthen it in the long term, whereas firms in heavily polluting industries consistently pursue radical green innovation across both time horizons. Our findings contribute to the business ethics literature by clarifying how institutional pressures and executive cognition jointly shape time-dependent innovation strategies and highlight the ethical tension between short-term conformity and long-term transformation. We offer practical guidance for firms to adopt adaptive green innovation strategies and for institutional actors to reduce ambiguity by enhancing the clarity, accountability, and benchmarking of environmental expectations.</p>