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This paper aims to investigate companies' environmental, social, governance (ESG), and financial implications of their commitment to the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). The focus is placed on companies operating in the three countries with the highest number of UNGC participants: Spain, France, and Japan. The results clearly reveal that adoption of the UNGC often requires an organizational change that fosters stakeholder engagement, ultimately resulting in improvements in companies' ESG performance. Additionally, the results reveal that ESG performance has a significant impact on financial performance for companies that adopted the principles of the UNGC. These findings provide both non-financial and financial incentives to companies to commit to this voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative, which will have important implications on companies' strategic management policies that aim to foster sustainable businesses and community development. Finally, the linkages between the UNGC-committed companies' ESG and financial performance may be influenced by geographical spread, mainly due to the appearance of differences in the institutional, societal, and cultural settings.

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The aim of this work is to analyse the process involving adoption of a corporate social responsibility initiative-the United Nations Global Compact-in a Spanish financial institution. Semi-structured interviews were conducted for such purpose with managers, workers and customers from this organisation. From the analysis carried out, it can be ascertained that only professionals from the specific field of corporate social responsibility in the organisation being analysed have suitable knowledge about the initiative adopted, while the other professionals are practically unaware of it-even among professionals such as accountants who should clearly have suitable knowledge about the subject in order to draft sustainability reports. As a result, the research also provides evidence about the ceremonial adoption of the United Nations Global Compact, highlighting the internal friction existing within an organisation that until very recently stood out in the Spanish banking sector for the amount of externally obtained awards in recognition of its sustainability practices.