The role of directors representing institutional ownership in sustainable development through corporate social responsibility reporting

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the effect that directors representing controlling shareholders, specifically institutional investors, have on corporate social responsibility (CSR) given that these investors are the core shareholders in civil law countries, owing to their high presence on boards. Thus, we analyze the effect of institutional directors on CSR disclosure, but also the impact of their classification between pressure‐sensitive and pressure‐resistant institutional directors, depending on if they maintain only an investment relationship with the firm or both an investment and a commercial link, respectively. We hypothesize that these directors may perform opposite roles (monitoring or aligning with managers) regarding CSR disclosure. We show a curvilinear relationship between institutional directors/pressure‐resistant directors and CSR reporting, suggesting the two opposite roles mentioned. However, pressure‐sensitive directors do not affect CSR disclosure. These findings indicate that there is an association between board members and strategic decisions. Moreover, our evidence shows that institutional directors do not act in an identical way. Finally, the enhancement of corporate governance depends on the proportion of institutional and pressure‐resistant directors on boards.

Board structures, liberal countries, and developed market economies. Do they matter in environmental reporting? An international outlook

“…Return on assets was also negative and statistically significant in the three models. BMEET presented a negative and significant coefficient only for Model 3, as predicted by Pucheta‐Martínez and Chiva‐Ortells (). The remainder of control variables was insignificant.…”

“…We also control for board size (BSIZE), calculated as the total number of directors on boards (Calza et al, ). Activity of corporate boards is defined as BMEET and is calculated as the number of meetings held by boards each year (Pucheta‐Martínez & Chiva‐Ortells, ). Regarding CEO duality (CEODUALITY), this is measured as a dummy variable with the value 1 if the same person serves simultaneously as CEO and president of the board, and 0, otherwise, in line with Helfaya and Moussa ().…”

The effect of the board on corporate social responsibility: bibliometric and social network analysis

“…checklist, counting words and sentences (Appuhami & Tashakor, 2017;Barakat et al, 2015;Jizi et al, 2014;Khan et al, 2013;Kolsi & Attayah, 2018;Sharif & Rashid, 2014;Zaid et al, 2019). Other studies measure CSRD using ESG rating depending on Bloomberg database (Al-Dah et al, 2018;Cucari et al, 2018;Giannarakis et al, 2014), and by using KPMG international surveys of CSR reporting (Fernandez-Feijoo et al, 2014), using a dummy variable (Liao et al, 2018;Pucheta-Martinez & Chiva-Ortells, 2018), Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (Chang et al, 2017), and GRI database (Cabeza-Garcia et al, 2018;Fuente et al, 2017). Almost 44% of the sampled articles used CSRD as a dependent variable (see Table 9), while nearly 54% used CSR (performance, practices, actions, engagement, and strategies).…”

Are Corporate Social Responsibility Courses Effective? A Longitudinal and Gender-Based Analysis in Undergraduate Students

“…To test the proposed relationships, we designed a survey instrument to gather data among undergraduate students attending a Spanish state university. In Spain, there are a large number of multinational corporations that are indexed in international rankings of CSR [49], and recent decades have seen a notable increase in the development of corporate social responsibility practices [49,50]. However, in terms of education, CSR is typically included in the curriculum of many Spanish universities, but is not yet treated consistently as a stand-alone subject, especially in state HE institutions [39].…”

“…Indeed, while males may have more to gain from CSR courses than women in terms of learning to adopt and apply ethical values such as compassion or empathy [66,67], both genders still benefit from these courses. Interestingly, this observation also arose in a relatively unexplored cultural context like Spain, where the interest in CSR has grown considerably in recent decades [39,49,50,68,69], but individuals' short-term orientation [51] can still negatively influence ethical decision-making and the effectiveness of CSR courses. By demonstrating in a longitudinal manner that CSR courses exert a positive impact on students' ethical decision-making in this cultural context, this study offers an important step in generalizing CSR courses' positive impact to similar cultural contexts.…”