Influence of Senior Executives Characteristics on Corporate Environmental Disclosures: A Bibliometric Analysis

Hafiz Muhammad Arslan,Bilal Bilal,Muhammad Siddique,Ye Chengang,Yusra Yahya

doi:10.3390/jrfm15030136

Abstract

This study aims to synthesize the literature on the top management team (TMT) characteristics influence on environmental disclosures of public organizations and identify recent trends, key themes, influential journals, and authors. Our study recruited 88 research articles on the relationship of TMT characteristics and environmental disclosures from 54 academic journals published from 2010 to 2021 for bibliometric analysis. Our study has identified three influential streams: (1) Role of Politically connections of TMT, good governance in environmental disclosures; (2) Significance of environmental disclosures and performance; and (3) institutional investors and environmental disclosures. Thematic map classifies the TMT characteristics and environmental disclosures relationship themes into four categories: Niche theme (e.g., financial expertise, CFO characteristics, CEO tenure, and board backgrounds); motor themes (e.g., environmental sustainability and climate change); emerging/declining themes (e.g., Environmental disclosure, managerial ownership, and CEO tenure); and basic/transversal themes (e.g., CEO characteristics, upper echelon theory, corporate governance). This study assists academicians, policymakers, managers, and consultants in the corporate sector to understand the role of different dimensions of TMT characteristics regarding environmental disclosures. Our study concludes with important practical implications and future research directions.

Highlights

Environmental disclosures by public organizations have gained immense attention as an important area of research in recent years due to adverse climate change (Bilal et al 2021; Ramos-Meza et al 2021)
The current study objective is to conduct a bibliometric overview of top management team (TMT) characteristics and environmental disclosure literature
Research Directions Our study provides several insights on TMT characteristics and environment disclosures literature

Summary

Introduction

Environmental disclosures by public organizations have gained immense attention as an important area of research in recent years due to adverse climate change (Bilal et al 2021; Ramos-Meza et al 2021). Institutional theory (Luo et al 2017; Marquis and Qian 2014) and stakeholder theory (Donaldson 1999; Thijssens et al 2015) view environmental disclosures as a response to the pressure mount by different stakeholders such as governments, activists, and other important stakeholders (Reid and Toffel 2009; Sutantoputra 2021; Van Aaken et al 2013). These environmental disclosures matter a lot for sustainability literature, when nuclear and alternative energy generation is discussed (Bilal et al 2022; Khan et al 2022; Lyu et al 2022) and in the era of COVID-19 (Adebayo et al 2022; Fareed et al 2021; Shuai et al 2021). Given the CEO’s pivotal position in corporate decision-making, researchers examined how several demographic and personality characteristics (e.g., gender, age, educational background, experience, personality, political orientation, religious views, experience, leadership style, strength, and media exposure) influence their companies’ environmental reporting decisions

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