Reporting on sustainability and HRM: a comparative study of sustainability reporting practices by the world's largest companies

Abstract

As a response to the growing public awareness on the importance of organisational contributions to sustainable development, there is an increased incentive for corporations to report on their sustainability activities. In parallel with this has been the development of ‘Sustainable HRM’ which embraces a growing body of practitioner and academic literature connecting the notions of corporate sustainability to HRM. The aim of this article is to analyse corporate sustainability reporting amongst the world's largest companies and to assess the HRM aspects of sustainability within these reports in comparison to environmental aspects of sustainable management and whether organisational attributes – principally country-of-origin – influences the reporting of such practices. A focus in this article is the extent to which the reporting of various aspects of sustainability may reflect dominant models of corporate governance in the country in which a company is headquartered. The findings suggest, first and against expectations, that the overall disclosure on HRM-related performance is not lower than that on environmental performance. Second, companies report more on their internal workforce compared to their external workforce. Finally, international differences, in particular those between companies headquartered in liberal market economies and coordinated market economies, are not as apparent as expected.

Keywords:

• comparative HRM
• global reporting initiative
• sustainability reporting
• Sustainable HRM

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Our sample includes: 29% of the companies from LME countries, 40% from CME countries (of which 12% are Japanese), 15% from MME countries and 10% from BRIC.

^2. Company distribution for each sector is as follows: primary (10%), services (49%) and manufacturing (41%).

^3. To address a possible ‘dirtier’ industries effect, we use the environmental impact classification of Butz and Plattner (1999) for different industries and generate four additional variables corresponding to an impact much below, somewhat below, much above and somewhat above the average impact across all industries. These variables are included in addition to the primary/manufacturing dummies and the results of the sensitivity analysis are available upon request.

^4. The results of this sensitivity analysis are available upon request.