Uncovering the Truth: Are CEOs influencing Corporate Social Responsibility reporting?

Abstract

Analyzing companies' CSR reports is essential to understand if they are an impression management (IM) tool for shaping messages according to certain motivations (Merkl-Davies & Brennan, 2007, 2011).Tone has been defined in several ways (Patelli & Pedrini, 2015). In a broader sense, tone is described as the affect or feeling of a communication (Henry, 2008). The main approach used to measure the tone of a text is based on the word’s frequency of a predetermined wordlist (Loughran & McDonald, 2015).

The tone of CSR disclosure is a very recent topic and needs further development (Albitar et al., 2023; Arena et al., 2015; Cho et al., 2010; Du & Yu, 2021; Fisher et al., 2020; García-Sánchez et al., 2019; Lu & Jagoda, 2023) . Sociological theories are one of the most researched theoretical frameworks in the field of IM (Merkl-Davies & Brennan, 2011). The main objective for this study is to understand how internal and external determinants influence the motivations of CEOs of oil and gas companies to emphasize CSR disclosure. This objective was operationalized by the four hypotheses presented.