Search results

This aim of this paper is to prove that the diversity of board capital is a significant driver of corporate governance. Board capital has increasingly been identified as a key part of governance mechanism that assists businesses to improve their sustainability reporting practices and sustainability performance. In addition, board capital has been recognized as being key to the development of good corporate governance in the private and public sectors.

The paper discusses whether the diversity of board capital is a significant driver of corporate governance.

This paper suggests that the best mixture of board capital for an individual company should be varied between industries and business models. Effective corporate governance assists in the attainment of high-level sustainability and financial performance, which, in turn, bolsters corporate reputation.

This paper presents new strategic insights into diversity of board capital that is pivotal to global leading companies in preparing their sustainability reports.

This paper justifies the need of diversity in board capital because it is one of the means to build strong corporate governance based on the stakeholders’ expectations and interests, and to create greater public trust and the prospects of the respective business.

This paper aims to illustrate that stakeholder engagement is a fundamental step of the sustainability reporting process, as it assists in defining the materiality and relevance of the information communicated and enhances greater transparency and greater accountability to stakeholders.

In today’s corporate world, the role of stakeholder engagement has been recognized as being significant in completing the process for materiality disclosure in sustainability reporting, and it has become one of the vital elements in advancing sustainable development in the corporate sector. The materiality approach has been recommended as the instrument for scoping and defining the content for sustainability reporting or reports that only disclose issues that are considered material from the perspective of the stakeholders. This is relevant to both businesses and stakeholders.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the leading global companies in preparing their sustainability reports.

The materiality principle is one of the top trends in sustainability reporting globally. Stakeholders have focused on the principle of materiality because of its vital importance in the context of sustainability. Materiality serves as a content-selection principle for determining the most significant sustainability matters to be included in sustainability reports. This has made reports more relevant for various stakeholders. Using the resource-based view and stakeholder theory, this paper aims to examine and uncover the antecedents and outcome of materiality disclosure in sustainability reporting.

To measure the extent of materiality disclosure, a content analysis was performed on the corporate reports of the largest listed companies in Malaysia. The relationships among the variables under investigation were examined using the partial least squares structural equation modelling technique.

While the results show that board activity, board independence and board size play significant roles as antecedents of materiality disclosure, this is not so with nationality diversity and gender diversity. In addition, the results have shown that the outcome of materiality disclosure is not significantly linked to corporate financial performance. The results show that normative stakeholder considerations are the primary motivating factor behind corporate sustainability reporting in Malaysia.

These results are of great interest to regulators, stakeholders, investors and companies alike. Enhancing materiality disclosure in sustainability reports can help in the transition to sustainable development and the successful achievement of the United Nations sustainable development goals.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study to examine the interplay between board diversity and materiality disclosure, along with their connections to corporate financial performance.