Eun-Hee Kim, Ph.D.

Research by Associate Professor and Area Chair, Strategy and Statistics, Eun-Hee Kim, Ph.D., which was published in the Journal of Management Studies, was recently recognized as a Distinguished Winner of the 2025 Award for Responsible Research in Management. This prestigious award is co-sponsored by Fellows of the Academy of Management and the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM). A total of 126 scholarly works were nominated for the award and Kim’s paper is one of only three distinguished winners.

“These studies exemplify the principles of responsible research,” stated Jacqueline Coyle-Shapiro, chair, Fellows RRM Award Selection Committee, in an announcement about the awards. “They strive for broad and significant societal benefits by informing policy, improving practice, and advancing theory. The winners are truly the ‘best of the best.’”

“Set & Done: Trade-offs between stakeholder expectation and attainment pressures in corporate carbon target management,” the paper which Kim co-authored with Patrick J. Callery, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Vermont, examines corporate carbon targets, the public commitments companies make to reduce carbon emissions by a set future date. Although these commitments have been widely adopted by businesses, especially over the past decade, they have failed to significantly reduce emissions.

For their study, the researchers evaluated carbon targets disclosed through the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a nonprofit organization that collects carbon-related data from companies. “It was backed by institutional investors because they felt that carbon emissions have impact on their investment portfolios and the outcomes,” Kim said. “The data is based on voluntary disclosure, but now the pressure is so high that most well-recognized companies disclose some level of carbon emissions.”

Specifically, in their review of disclosures by U.S. firms between 2011 and 2019, the researchers focused on the phenomenon of deceptive target change, where companies modify their targets to make them seem more ambitious and also more attainable. “There are multiple dimensions that go into defining carbon targets, but people’s attention tends to focus on the target size,” Kim explained. “A company may say, ‘I’m increasing my target from 30% to 50%,’ but at the same time, it’s moving its target year farther into the future so the effective effort level that is required per year goes down. We call that deceptive target change.”

Key findings from this study revealed that due to countervailing stakeholder and attainment pressures, firms with smaller or larger targets are more likely to make deceptive target changes. What’s more, greater monitoring of company policies, a common practice under high institutional investor ownership, ironically, exacerbates the problem. However, when company practices are monitored, for example, when media scrutinize actual climate impacts, the likelihood of deceptive target changes lessens. The study concluded that the external monitoring of company actions, not policies, can improve the accountability over climate commitments.

“We want to make sure that the corporations engage in sustainable behavior and that the investment flow goes into sustainable companies,” Kim explained. “But if the policies are different from actual practices, it’s going to make the situation worse from a sustainability perspective, because it distorts decisions made by stakeholders, whether they are investors, consumers, local community, or regulators.”

Kim said she and her co-author are honored to receive the award and are excited that their study will inspire further research in this critical area.