The Role of the Board in the Dissemination of Integrated Corporate Social Reporting

Abstract

The stakeholder theory recognizes that, besides shareholders and creditors, there exists a broad range of agents who are interested in companies' attitudes towards sustainability. Through corporate social reporting, the social and environmental effects of companies' economic actions are communicated to interest groups. However, the information contained in financial and social reports tends to be presented quite separately from that in the others, and this may lead to confusion among users. Therefore, several major companies have introduced an integrated reporting system, which coherently summarizes the information available, thus making stakeholders participants in business management. Corporate governance mechanisms such as the Board of Directors play an important role in good practices of corporate social responsibility, implementing policies of stakeholder engagement, including processes to achieve holistic transparency. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the influence played by certain features of the Board of Directors in the degree of information integration presented by leading non‐financial multinational firms. Specifically, we examined 568 companies from 15 countries, for the period 2008–2010. The results obtained show that growth opportunities, the size of a company and its management bodies, together with gender diversity, are the most important factors in the integrated dissemination of information. This effect has been confirmed for the Anglo‐Saxon, Germanic and Latin models of corporate governance. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment