The role of sustainability integration into the corporate strategy – A perspective on analysts’ perceptions and buy recommendations

Abstract

Sustainability is playing an increasingly important role in analysts' assessments of companies. Companies can address this importance through a sustainability strategy by choosing between a sustainability strategy independent from the corporate strategy (standalone sustainability strategy) or integrating sustainability into their corporate strategy (integrated strategy). For this purpose, we investigate the effects of different stages of sustainability integration into the corporate strategy on analysts' perceptions and buy recommendations. Our results show that analysts favour an integrated strategy over a standalone sustainability strategy. This finding is reflected in higher analysts’ perceptions of an integrated strategy. While a standalone sustainability strategy leads to fewer buy recommendations, an integrated strategy does not affect buy recommendations. We discuss our findings in relation to stakeholder theory and voluntary disclosure theory. Our study contributes to understanding how analysts perceive different stages of integrating sustainability into the corporate strategy. This understanding is relevant as analysts work as intermediaries in the capital market between companies and investors.