Business Sustainability: The Trend of Human Resource Disclosure Based on Malaysian Evidence

Norhayati Abdullah,Maliah Sulaiman Maliah Sulaiman,A.h Fatima A.H Fatima

doi:10.37231/jmtp.2020.2.3.169

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the trend of human resource disclosure (HRD) quality based on publicly disclosed annual reports of 235 Malaysian listed companies. The data was collected through content analysis method using HRD index. The results reveal that there is an increasing trend of HRD quality from 2010 to 2014. However the significant increase is only between 2012 and 2013. This study provides empirical support for Institutional theory’s coercive isomorphism, through its findings on quality of HRD. This is because, the related disclosure regulations and the Malaysian government policy through Malaysia Plan may have significantly influenced firms to increase HRD quality in their annual reports.

Highlights

The corporate reporting by public companies should serve to provide information pertaining to their resources that facilitate their growth and sustainability in the market, including the disclosure of human resource and human capital (Mariappanadar and Kairouz, 2017) information
Prior literature has shown that effective human resource (HR) practices (HRP) and its disclosure i.e. the human resource disclosure (HRD) has significant influence on company performance (Huselid,1995; Collins & Clark, 2003; Katou, 2008; Moideenkutty et al, 2011; Darwish et al, 2013; Vermeeren et al, 2014; Riley et al, 2017; Gamerslag, 2013; Abdullah et al, 2020)
HRD has been studied as part of a larger component, i.e. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosure (Tsang, 1998; Nik Ahmad and Sulaiman, 2004; Thomson and Zarina, 2004; Kuasirikun and Sherer, 2004)

Summary

Introduction

The corporate reporting by public companies should serve to provide information pertaining to their resources that facilitate their growth and sustainability in the market, including the disclosure of human resource and human capital (Mariappanadar and Kairouz, 2017) information. This issue is in line with a continuous evolution of public disclosure in the annual reports, from financial only to financial and nonfinancial information in the recent years. A subset of HRD, human capital disclosure (HCD), has been studied as part of Intellectual capital disclosure literature (Abdolmohammadi, 2005; Ousama, Fatima and Hafiz, 2011; Haji, 2016). HRD has not been given specific attention in previous studies

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