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

TLDR

Growing public awareness of corporate contributions to sustainable development has increased incentives for companies to report sustainability activities, while the emergence of Sustainable HRM links corporate sustainability to human resource management. The study aims to analyze sustainability reporting of the world's largest firms, evaluate the HRM components relative to environmental aspects, and examine how country‑of‑origin shapes these practices. The authors compare sustainability reports of large firms, assessing how HRM and environmental disclosures reflect the dominant corporate governance models of their headquarters’ countries. The analysis shows that HRM disclosures are as extensive as environmental ones, that firms report more on internal than external workforce, and that differences between liberal and coordinated market economies are less pronounced than expected.

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.