Business Responses to Competing Institutional Logics in a Climate Change Field: the dataset

Managers are increasingly under pressure from climate-activist shareholders to take action against climate change, which runs counter to traditional shareholders' expectation of short-term profit maximization. How do managers respond to the simultaneous presence of such conflicting demands? To address this question, we propose a model of organizational behavior. In our model, we attribute the source of this conflict to the coexistence of environmental and market logics—the former promoting and the latter discouraging climate actions within organizations. From our model, we derive hypotheses to predict managerial responses to these competing institutional logics and test them through a series of experimental vignette studies, with data collected via Prolific. We find that the environmental logic is associated with significantly higher investments in reducing emissions compared to the market logic. Surprisingly, we find that the threat of divestment from shareholders has an insignificant effect on managerial responses. Thus, climate activist shareholders may be more effective in advancing their agenda through engagement with management rather than disengagement. Overall, we conclude that shareholders’ climate activism has significant potential to drive decarbonization in organizations, which can be further facilitated by policies guaranteeing shareholders a say on environmental issues.