Naomi Soderstrom

University of Melbourne

Compensation Incentives and the Effect of Chief Sustainability Officers

Monday, March 23, 2026 – 09:45 – 11:00 AM (CET)

This session will be held online only. To join virtually, please register in advance using this link.

Seminar Abstract
Companies appoint Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) to advance their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) agendas. For most companies, CSOs are part of the broader executive team, but it is becoming more common for CSOs to be included amongst companies’ top management team, suggesting they have an influential role in the company. In this paper, we investigate how this choice is related to company sustainability and financial performance and how CSO incentives moderate these relations. We find that, relative to having a CSO that is not on the top management team, having a CSO on the top management team is associated with higher sustainability performance, but with lower financial performance. This association is the strongest when the CSO has ESG metrics in his/her compensation contract. The composition of CSO compensation also matters; CSOs on the top management team who have a higher proportion of compensation paid as salary are associated with the greatest subsequent improvements in sustainability performance.

Speaker Bio
Naomi Soderstrom joined the Department of Accounting at the University of Melbourne in 2012. Naomi received her PhD in Accounting and Information Systems from Northwestern University in Illinois, United States.

She is Editor of the Journal of Managerial Accounting Research and on the editorial boards of several other journals. She is a member of professional organisations on thee continents, as well as the academic honor societies, Phi Beta Kappa and Beta Gamma Sigma. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, Dr. Soderstrom taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Washington and the University of Colorado at Denver. Naomi has also been a Visiting Professor at the Indian School of Business, University of Maastricht (Maastricht, Netherlands), IE Business School (Madrid, Spain), the University of Mannheim (Mannheim, Germany) and the Stuttgart Institute of Management and Technology (Stuttgart, Germany).

Admission information
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