Executive communication with stakeholders on sustainability: the case of Poland

Abstract

Sustainability reporting is rapidly developing in the European Union – from voluntary Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosure over to mandatory non-financial reporting (NFR), then over to Economic, Social and Governance (ESG) – with the ambition of becoming as important as financial reporting. This paper investigates whether executives act as change agents in this process by setting a tone at the top, and how their communication changes as time progresses. We use methods from computational corpus linguistics to analyze commentaries by companies listed at the Warsaw Stock Exchange between 2017 and 2021. Results show how top managers are not aligned with the sustainability transition. Their commentaries are bluntly positive and lack performance information. Over time, change and environmental challenges gain attention. In sum, executives appear to respond primarily to investor needs. While showing respect to stakeholders, they avoid setting goals and reporting effects. Effective regulation may bring about the necessary change.

Keywords:

• sustainability reporting
• non-financial reporting
• textual analysis
• central and eastern Europe
• leadership

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Please note that, in contrast to the letter to shareholders, which is a required element of the annual report in Poland under the Regulation of the Minister of Finance of 19 February 2009, the sustainability commentary itself is voluntary and its contents are not regulated.

2 Please note that in 2018, there is a marked drop in the number of commentaries as non-financial disclosures became a section of the management report. In subsequent years, however, executives returned to writing commentaries.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [2021-124151NA-I00]; Narodowe Centrum Nauki [2019/35/B/HS4/03800].