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This paper aims to explore the nexus between integrated reporting and sustainability embeddedness. It seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the nexus by obtaining in-depth insight from the sensemaking of those in practice.

A single exploratory case study design strategy was applied to a leading stock exchange listed company in the property industry in South Africa. Rich qualitative data were gathered by applying multiple data gathering techniques to a diverse group of employees within the case company.

This empirical study contributes a metaphor of a cog and chain and nine themes that elucidate employee sensemaking at the nexus. Integrated reporting was found to drive sustainability embeddedness and foster changes within the organisation. The themes offer in-depth insight into how employees made sense of integrated reporting as a driver for sustainability embeddedness.

The findings emerged from a single case study that operated in a mandatory disclosure context and are therefore not generalisable. The findings reflect the intended outcomes of integrated reporting and further research to explore the unintended outcomes and challenges associated with integrated reporting is suggested.

The study contributes to a growing practice based agenda by offering a better understanding of how integrated reporting and sustainability are conceptualised and adopted in practice.

The findings offer organisations’ guidance on integrated reporting and sustainability embeddedness adoption which can have vast implications for society and the environment.

The study responds to gaps in the literature and calls for studies to explore the intersection between integrated reporting and sustainability embeddedness by engaging those in practice.

This paper examines the role of professional associations, governmental agencies, and international accounting and auditing bodies in promulgating standards to deter and detect fraud, domestically and abroad. Specifically, it focuses on the role played by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the US Government Accounting Office (GAO), and other national and foreign professional associations, in promulgating auditing standards and procedures to prevent fraud in financial statements and other white‐collar crimes. It also examines several fraud cases and the impact of management and employee fraud on the various business sectors such as insurance, banking, health care, and manufacturing, as well as the role of management, the boards of directors, the audit committees, auditors, and fraud examiners and their liability in the fraud prevention and investigation.

This study aims to demonstrate how Carney’s ladder of analytical abstraction is used to examine the motivations of banks for reporting human capital (HC) information.

The authors use semi-structured interviews of senior bank employees at eight large New Zealand banks. They analyse the managers’ views using a constructive mapping of responses applying Carney’s ladder of analytical abstraction. The findings are interpreted from a stakeholder theory perspective.

The authors find that the New Zealand banks report on HC to manage reputation, strengthen employee relationships and achieve competitive advantages. The results suggest that banks engage in opportunistic reporting to distract external stakeholders while advancing their interests.

The study will guide researchers in the use of Carney’s ladder of analytical abstraction in analysing qualitative data.

This study provides insights for businesses to improve the consistency and quality of HC reporting and ensure that the information needs of broader stakeholder groups are met.

Some previous voluntary reporting studies analyse their data using inductive analysis. The authors use Carney’s ladder of analytical abstraction as a framework to guide our inductive analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how university employees’ and students’ understandings of Title IX may affect both students’ disclosure of victimization and perpetration and employees’ reporting to Title IX coordinators.

Study 1 surveyed 114 university employees about their knowledge of Title IX and what it requires of them. Study 2 surveyed 845 students to determine their knowledge of and opinions about Title IX mandatory reporting requirements, their beliefs regarding rape myths and feminism, and their sexual victimization history.

In general, faculty/staff members thought they were required to report sexual violence to Title IX coordinators and agreed with the reporting requirement. The majority (78.9 percent) of faculty/staff members said they would report a sexual assault disclosed by a student to the Title IX coordinator. Most students believed faculty/staff members were required to report sexual violence and reported high agreement with the reporting requirement. More than a third of students (36.3 to 36.9 percent) were unsure whether they would tell a faculty member about sexual assault (their own or that of a third party), and about a fifth (16.7 to 22.8 percent) were not willing to disclose.

These results underscore the importance of trainings to encourage both student disclosure and reporting by mandated reporters of sexual violence on college campuses.

Hospitality work setting is error-prone, rendering error handling critical for effective organizational operation and quality of service delivery. An organization’s attitude toward errors can be traced back to one fundamental question: should errors be tolerated/accepted or not? This study aims to examine the relationships between error tolerance and hospitality employees’ three critical work behaviors, namely, learning behavior, error reporting and service recovery performance. Psychological safety and self-efficacy are hypothesized to be the underlying attitudinal mechanisms that link error tolerance with these behavioral outcomes.

This study relied on a survey methodology, collecting data from 304 frontline restaurant employees in Turkey and their direct supervisors. SPSS 25.0 and Amos 25.0 were used for analysis.

The results revealed that error tolerance had direct positive relationships with employees’ psychological safety and self-efficacy, both of which had positive impacts on learning behavior and error reporting. In addition, learning behavior positively influenced employees’ service recovery performance, as rated by the employees’ supervisors.

This study identifies error tolerance as an organizational distal factor that influences employees’ learning behavior, error reporting and service recovery performance; and identifies self-efficacy and psychological safety as mediators of the relationship between error tolerance and behavioral outcomes. The findings help clarify the longstanding debate over the relationship between an organization’s attitude toward errors and its employees’ learning behavior. The findings also shed light on the advantages of tolerating error occurrence for organizations, which is especially important as most hospitality organizations pursue perfection with aversive attitudes toward errors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of manager responsiveness and social presence in the decision to engage in fraudulent expense reporting. While research has focussed on the direct effect of information technology (IT) on user behaviors, there is a lack of research investigating possible mediating factors of this relationship. As such, the paper examines the impact of affect and its effect on users’ behavior when using ITs.

The authors conduct an experiment to investigate possible behavior differences due to affect formulated in the early phase of pre-travel approval and the use of IT in the expense reporting phase. Consistent with social presence theory, the experiment participants engage in the pre-travel approval and expense reporting phases using either face-to-face communication (high-social presence) or web-based communication (low-social presence). The authors manipulate conditions in which affect is formulated by varying the manager's responses to the pre-travel approval request between positive and negative. All participants in the experiment then file an expense report.

The authors find that negative managerial support for employees’ pre-travel requests and the resulting negative employee affect have a significant impact on expense reporting behavior. Social presence during the pre-travel approval and expense reporting phases itself is not a sufficient factor to explain variations in final expense reporting behavior. However, when considering manager responsiveness, employee affect, and social presence together, the authors find that social presence is not an isolated factor. If an employee forms negative feelings, a low-social presence as observed in web-based communication leads to more undesired expense reporting behavior.

Results of this study contribute both to research and practice. This research is the first to investigate expense reporting fraud in a controlled experiment to isolate possible causes of the behavior using an experiment methodology. In addition, the paper investigates two very important factors identified in the prior literature as critical factors explaining the effect of using ITs on actual behaviors: manager responsiveness and social presence.

As companies seek help from ITs to process and manage expense reports in order to curb ever-rising operating costs, an important but unapparent assumption is consistently overlooked: do people act the same way when facing the less-human IT as when facing a real person? This study contributes to the literature by investigating this issue from two perspectives, the psychological factor due to manager responsiveness and the effect of social presence by using less-human IT to complete the expense report process.

Recent economic situations have put pressure on organizations to cut costs by implementing new technologies to streamline expense reporting processes. At the same time, deterring fraudulent behavior is also a top priority in many organizations. This study provides evidence that psychological factors cannot be overlooked when information systems are used to improve business processes and prevent fraud.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how disclosure of employee issues by a large UK bank may or may not promote transparency and accountability (as assessed by the completeness of the account) toward the employee stakeholder group, and to shed light on the implications of the organisation‐society relationship for employee accountability.

The intrinsic stakeholder framework forms the basis of the qualitative, longitudinal analysis. It is adopted as the moral ground for the provision of a “complete” account of employee issues. In seeking to shed light on the organisation‐society relationship and its implications for reporting on employee issues the authors build a broader theoretical framework incorporating various social and political theories dealing with legitimacy, political economy, and language and rhetoric. Interpretive and critical approaches are employed. The analysis draws on an extensive review of published materials relating to employment in the UK retail banking industry and NatWest in particular, impacts of workplace changes occurring in the banking sector, and to the economic, social and political environment over the period of the study.

The findings indicate that what and how NatWest reported on employee issues was influenced by considerations other than transparency and employee accountability. The analysis highlights the complexity of the role of disclosures in the organisation‐society relationship and consequently the limitations of the use of a single theoretical framework to interpret disclosures.

The longitudinal analysis indicates how reporting practices are issue and context dependent and points to the limitations of theorising in corporate social reporting based on a single time frame and a limited analysis of the reported issues.

In highlighting a lack of accountability to employees, the findings have implications for the development of reporting standards on issues relevant to employees. Over time, it is hoped that development of an employee inclusive reporting framework, along with exposure of the contradictory role that reports may play in promoting accountability, will contribute toward improved employee management practices.

This study contributes to the corporate social reporting literature by extending the analysis beyond the firm focused stakeholder management perspective to considering disclosures from a moral perspective and the extent to which the complex organisation‐society relationship might work against the promotion of transparency and accountability toward stakeholders (specifically employees). In this way, through an in‐depth longitudinal analysis of disclosures from multiple perspectives, the paper contributes to theorising of the role of social disclosure in the organisation‐society relationship.

Customer feedback can help to identify problem areas and strengths, and generate ideas for service improvements. Most feedback is given to frontline employees directly rather than submitted through formal channels. UZnfortunately, employees tend to be reluctant to report such unsolicited feedback. This paper seeks to explore key drivers of employees' willingness to report customer feedback to facilitate organizational learning. Specifically, the paper examines the joint effects of relational social capital, structural social capital, feedback valence (FV) (positive versus negative), and the intended use of information (service improvement versus performance evaluation) on employees' willingness to report unsolicited customer feedback back to the organization.

The paper used two studies. First, semi‐structured in‐depth interviews of employees across organizational levels in two service firms were conducted to explore the relationships between the variables of interest. Second, a quasi‐experimental study was conducted in which FV and intended use of information were manipulated in a true experimental design, and respondents' organization served as backdrop to measure relational and structural social capital.

FV and the intended use of information moderate the impact of social capital on employees' reporting intention. Specifically, the authors found that social capital had a positive impact on employees' willingness to report negative feedback used for evaluation purposes (social capital was less important when used for service improvements). In contrast, for positive feedback, social capital had a positive impact when feedback was used for service improvements (but less so in an evaluation context where staff were naturally motivated to report positive feedback).

Firms need to boost social capital to enhance employees' willingness to report negative feedback that is used for performance evaluation, and positive feedback that is used for understanding and cementing strengths. Social capital can be enhanced through increasing trust and a shared vision (through open and frequent communications), and through providing incentives (rewards and recognition) and improved reporting processes, infrastructure, and training.

Service employees' reporting behavior of customer feedback received is important but under‐researched. This paper is a first step into understanding the drivers of employees' willingness to report such feedback.

Whistle-blowing has the important role of reducing the prevalence and impact of wrongdoing in organisations. The purpose of this paper is to utilise a very large survey of Australian Public Service (APS) workers to replicate the findings of previous studies in relation to whistle-blowing likelihood and to extend the quantitative findings in relation to whistle-blowing antecedents to include ethnicity or cultural marginalisation and occupational and professional role and affiliation.

The authors utilise the 2014 APS Census, a large data set containing 100,000 observations relating to employee engagement, leadership, health, satisfaction and general impressions of the public service. Logistic regression is employed to obtain estimates and marginal effects in respect to predictors for whistle-blowing. The authors determine the Bayesian information criterion to assess the impact of ethnicity on the probability of whistle-blowing.

The findings support the notion that organisational “outsiders” tend to report perceived wrongdoing less than those who feel assured of their cultural or organisational status. The authors further find support for the notion that membership of small organisational groupings, primarily measured by organisational size, also tends to reduce the whistle-blowing likelihood. Opportunities for further research and potential policy and practical issues are discussed briefly in conclusion.

While confirming the predictors seen in many previous studies, the authors identify groups who report more or less than expected that have not been reported in previous research. These include employees from a non-English speaking background and various occupational and professional groups “at risk” of low reporting.

The purpose of this study is to provide evidence on the category, quantity and quality of voluntary employee-related information Australian listed companies disclose in their annual report. An explanation is also sought to determine whether companies adopt employee-related disclosures to legitimise their relationship with society. Voluntary adoption of corporate governance best practice recommendations is used as a measure of companies' attempts to attain ex ante legitimacy. Media agenda setting theory is used as a measure of an attempt to gain legitimacy ex post following adverse publicity from the media.

The annual reports of all companies with at least one employee listed on the Australian Stock Exchange with a 30th June balance date of 2004 are examined to identify employee-related disclosures. This employee-related information is categorised and identified as positive, negative or a combination of positive and negative information by three independent coders. Ordinary least squares regression is used to explain the quantity of disclosure with a corporate governance score and number of adverse newspaper articles included as experimental variables.

Adopting voluntary corporate governance mechanisms is associated with the quantity of voluntary annual report employee-related disclosures. Higher levels of adverse publicity are also significantly associated with higher quantities of employee-related disclosures. The quality of these disclosures is questioned because 124 companies had adverse publicity relating to employees and only two of these companies reported any negative employee-related disclosures. Few companies from the whole sample reported any negative information relating to their employees in their annual report, with 98 per cent of companies reporting positive news or no news.

Most previous social responsibility research has focused on environmental disclosures. This study is original because it focuses on employee-related disclosures. Honest, transparent employee disclosures are an international corporate governance recommendation by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and studies have not previously tested the relation between reporting recommended corporate governance mechanisms and employee-related disclosures in annual reports.