Environmental degradation, increased poverty, and displacement, are just some of the effects brought about by climate change. As these effects continue to batter the world, the call to mitigate climate change is becoming louder and more frequent. In responding to this call we commence our related investigation with a review of the multidisciplinary literature in this area. This includes integrating the human resource management literature, the sociology literature, the environmental studies literature, and an econometrics methodology into examining and analyzing compensation practices as innovative solutions for tackling climate change. We employ a fixed panel analysis, and examine disclosed organizational data from 42 of the largest global fossil fuel organizations – arguably the principal climate change contributors. Our analysis takes into consideration multiple control variables (e.g., age, size, value), and employs a broad dataset (2005-2016). Our findings suggest that executive stock- option compensation oriented around a three-year or more vesting period will enhance green behaviours by the respective management. In part, this can likely be attributed to the link between personal profitability and its contingency on a firm’s stock price growth and overall organizational performance. The contributions of this paper reach beyond the traditional human resource management literature, where many studies are oriented around only linking sustainability targets to compensation in hopes of mitigating climate change. Instead, our findings and conclusions, not only clear up misconceptions related to linking sustainability practices and compensation for the purpose of mitigating climate change, but also offer newer perspectives in looking at how compensation practices can be best manipulated (through more specific timelines) to enhance greener behaviours.
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