From expertise to action: STEM-related human capital in top management teams and corporate climate adaptation and resilience

David Bendig, Thomas Schäper, Katharina Hennes, Colin Schulz

Abstract

To safeguard long-term value creation and capture, incumbent firms face growing pressure to pursue corporate climate adaptation and resilience strategies. Given the pivotal role of top managers in driving adaptive change, this study examines how top management teams' human capital shapes firms' engagement in climate adaptation and resilience across different organizational and environmental contexts. Drawing on the attention-based view, we argue that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education directs managerial attention toward climate-related risks and opportunities, prioritizing climate adaptation and resilience responses over competing strategic concerns. We further theorize that this relationship is contingent on firms' inventiveness, their exposure to physical climate hazards, and climate change sentiment expressed by financial stakeholders. Depending on these contexts, STEM-educated top management team members are particularly valuable in processing climate-related information, developing corporate climate adaptation and resilience strategies that reconfigure existing business models and value chains, and mobilizing organizational support for their implementation. Analyzing data from the Carbon Disclosure Project from large, listed U.S. firms from 2013 to 2020, we find empirical support for our hypotheses. Additional analyses show that STEM education is more strongly associated with engagement in climate adaptation and resilience than other educational backgrounds and that its association varies across STEM subfields. Our findings advance understanding of how executive cognition and attention-directing contexts jointly shape firms' responses to climate-related challenges and highlight the role of STEM expertise in enabling disruptive, sustainability-oriented transformation. We also derive implications for executive hiring, leadership development, and climate-related policy design.