Exploring a scale of organizational barriers for enterprises' climate change adaptation strategies

Abstract

Enterprises face changing climate conditions within their daily business. Thus, they are affected directly through climate change impacts on their operations or indirectly by climate change impacts on the supply chain. Even if enterprises are aware of the relevance of adapting to climate change, there exist barriers that impede organizational change strategies. In order to mainstream research on barrier categorization of climate change adaptation, we want to explore a scale of organizational barriers for enterprises' climate change adaptation strategies. By developing a barrier scale, we contribute to future research by allowing conclusive causal explanations for the occurrence of barriers and how they can be overcome. As barriers are context-specific, we decided for an empirical setting in a specific context regarding organizational climate change adaptation. In this study, we focus on multinational enterprises' supply chains, especially the stakeholder group of small and medium-sized suppliers. As small and medium-sized enterprises are stakeholders of multinational enterprises, their adaptation to climate change is relevant for multinational enterprises as well. The value of our study is threefold: First, we present the first empirically explored scale of organizational barriers for enterprises' climate change strategies by factor analysis. Second, we describe what multinational enterprises should learn for their strategic practices concerning an effective and efficient climate change adaptation in the supply chain. And third, even if we confirm that barriers are contextspecific, we would suggest our explored scale for organizational barriers for other context-specific changes strategies.