General propensity for inter-organizational environmental disclosure imitation: an international perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the determinants of the general propensity toward inter-organizational imitation of environmental disclosure. We approach inter-organizational imitation as the vector for change in similarity within four embedded institutional reference levels, i.e., the international level (across all firms from the six countries), the international industry level, the country level, and the industry level within a country. Our sample comprises firms from six countries, three of which are from countries within the same free-trade agreement and the other from disparate countries not linked by such an agreement. Results show that the uncertainty in a firm’s country is positively linked to environmental disclosure inter-organizational imitation at each reference level. Furthermore, the similarity existing within a reference group and the cultural diversity on corporate boards of the imitating firm are negatively linked to environmental disclosure imitation. Finally, our results show that firms imitate the environmental disclosure of firms from other countries and industries more than those of their own country and industry. These results provide enhance our understanding of institutional contexts’ role in the evolution and diffusion of environmental disclosure practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Inter-organizational imitation
• environmental disclosure
• neo-institutional theory
• SDGs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Table 5 also shows that the independent variables are related to each other, which can lead to problems of multi-collinearity in the linear regressions and bias the results. However, the Variance of Inflation Factors (VIF untabulated) of all the variables of each model are lower than 10 indicating that there’s no problem of multicollinearity. Durbin-Watson statistic (untabulated) for the regression of the global imitation is 1.886; for that of international imitation within the industry of 1.727; 1.808 for the country; and 1.711 for the industry within the country. These numbers are very close to 2, which means that it is unlikely that there is a problem with the independence of error terms. The histograms show that both the observations and the residuals are distributed normally for each regression.