The Factors Influencing Sustainability Disclosure: An Empirical Investigation on Companies Operating in China

Sustainability disclosure has emerged as a main tool for communicating a company’s commitment and contribution to the environment and society. Various theories have been developed to provide explanations and predictions that attempt to understand sustainability disclosure behaviour. Empirical studies, likewise, adopt different theoretical frameworks, conventionally linking one or more firm-specific characteristics to sustainability disclosure practice. Despite the extensive work has already been done by researchers in sustainability disclosure behaviour, there are still research gaps to be bridged. This study is inspired by the imperativeness of understanding the sustainability disclosure behaviours and focuses on a specific group of Chinese companies that are facing legitimacy crises. The purpose of this study is to investigate the motivations for, and the determinants of, corporate sustainability disclosure behaviour. Following a strand of literature which considers legitimacy as a main motivation for sustainability disclosure, companies facing legitimacy crises have been identified to make a comparison to those companies not facing legitimacy crises. Additionally, sustainability performance and corporate governance are investigated as salient determinants of corporate sustainability disclosure. This study examines the direct and interactive effects of legitimacy crises, sustainability performance and corporate governance on the quantity and quality of sustainability disclosure. The findings of this study could contribute theoretically to the extant literature on the how legitimacy crises, sustainability performance and corporate governance could individually influence a company’s sustainability behaviour. Moreover, one novel contribution of this study is the proposal of an interactive relationship of the three factors that have long been considered as independent and how they jointly influence corporate sustainability disclosure. The targeted sample group in this study comprises the companies facing legitimacy crises. Internet searching on news archive, government websites and other external sources has helped to identify those companies exposed involved in environmental and social misconduct in a period from 2010 to 2015. These companies form the original sample (i.e. misconduct group); and a control group of companies is formed by matching their size, ownership structure, industry and the year of observation to this original sample (non-misconduct or match group). The total sample size, 414 observations across six years, includes 207 observations in the misconduct group and 207 in the non-misconduct (match) group. Two sets of analyses were performed to test the hypotheses: comparison tests and regression analyses. Mean comparison tests provided preliminary results, while the mean of the quantity and quality of sustainability disclosure is compared. Regression analyses employed an OLS regression model and tested two sets of models on: (a) the direct effects of legitimacy crises, sustainability performance, and corporate governance on both the quantity and the quality of sustainability disclosure; (b) the interactions of the above three factors on the quantity and the quality of sustainability disclosure, including the interactions between any two factors and one three-way interaction. Additional regression analyses were performed to explore the effects of sustainability performance and legitimacy crises on the changes in the quantity and the quality of sustainability disclosure. The core findings of this study are: (i) sustainability performance and corporate governance are significantly and positively associated with the quantity and the quality of sustainability disclosure, whereas legitimacy crisis is positively associated with the quantity, but negatively associated with the quality of sustainability disclosure; (ii) sustainability performance has no considerable influence on the quantity and quality of sustainability disclosure in the misconduct group, but has significantly positive effect on the quantity and quality of sustainability in the non-misconduct group. In contrast, corporate governance is significantly and positively associated with the quantity and quality of sustainability disclosure in both the misconduct and non-misconduct groups; (iii) the three-way interaction is discussed according to eight scenarios (based on the changes in the three variables) and is presented statistically as positively associating with both the quantity and the quality of sustainability disclosure. These findings could lead to future investigation on the interactive effects of individual factors which have long been treated as irrelated. Moreover, this study provide evidence on “contingent” determinants rather than “fixed” determinants. To be specific, motivation for sustainability disclosure could be different, such as for legitimacy purpose or for resource-based purpose, under various circumstance.