Global Business and Management Research: An International Journal

Vol. 10, No. 3 (2018, Special Issue)

Moderating Effects of Corporate Life Cycle on the

Relationship between Primary Stakeholders’
Attributes and ESG Disclosure
Sharifah Buniamin *
College of Business Management and Accounting, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Malaysia
Email: sharifah@uniten.edu.my

Nik Nazli Nik Ahmad

Kulliyyah of Economics and Management Science, IIUM, Malaysia

* Corresponding Author

Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the role of corporate life cycle (CLC) in
moderating the relationship between primary stakeholders’ attributes and ESG disclosure.
Design/methodology/approach: The data is obtained from questionnaire survey distributed to
top management of Public Listed Companies in Malaysia.
Findings: A significant moderating effects of CLC are found for the relationship between
employee legitimacy and employee urgency with ESG disclosure. Companies in growth life
cycle reported ESG better than companies in mature and revival life cycle when they highly
perceived on employee legitimacy and urgency.
Research limitations/implications: The data analysed is based on data collected in one point of
time and only include three primary stakeholder groups; shareholders, employees and customers.
Practical implications: The application of stakeholder identification and salience theory
(Mitchell, Agle, and Wood, 1997) can provide managers a useful tool to better identify and
understand the influence of primary stakeholders’ attributes on a corporate's activities in
particular reporting ESG information.
Originality/value: The study contributes to the understanding of stakeholders’ relationship with
regard to ESG disclosure in different CLC stages.

Keywords: ESG Disclosure, Primary Stakeholders, Stakeholders’ Attributes, Corporate Life

Cycle, Moderating, Theory of Stakeholder Identification And Salience

Introduction
ESG disclosure is a term that is regarded as official corporate reports outside the financial reports
published which focusing on information related to environmental (E), social (S) and governance
(G) matters. Past researches in corporate disclosure have been conducted for a separate element
for example environmental disclosure (Fatima, Abdullah, and Sulaiman, 2015; and Nik Ahmad
and Ahmed Haraf, 2013), social disclosure (Salawati, Abu Hassan, and Sheung, 2012) and
governance disclosure (Elmagrhi, Ntim, and Wang, 2016; Nerantzidis and Tsamis, 2017).
Meanwhile, ESG disclosure is also relevant to by a number of other names including, but not
restricted to corporate social disclosure (CSD), corporate environmental disclosure (CER), triple
bottom line (TBL) disclosure, corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD), corporate social

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and environmental disclosure (CSER) and corporate sustainability (CS) disclosure. This present
study considers such disclosure relevant to ESG disclosure.
Many companies produce ESG reports to meet the increasing demands of their stakeholders.
Communicating ESG activities and performance effectively to its stakeholders helps a company
to build trust and credibility (De Silva Lokuwaduge and Heenetigala, 2017). Moreover,
environmental disclosure is useful to stakeholders and enhance corporate legitimacy (Cormier
and Magnan, 2015), thereby contributing toward enhancing the companies’ reputation.
Developments in ESG disclosure is also evident from pressures by various stakeholder groups.
Among the factors that have contributed to this are; the increasing stakeholder concern about
climate change (Jaaffar, Amran, and Rajadurai, 2018), and the value of such reporting in
supporting stakeholders’ decision making (Kocmanová, Karpíšek, and Klímková, 2012). Several
previous studies showed that ESG disclosure is influenced by particular stakeholder groups other
than shareholders (de Villiers and van Staden, 2010). This include the general public (Neu,
Warsame and Pedwell, 1998); lobby groups (Deegan and Blomquist, 2006); fund managers
(Mohd Said et al., 2013); and community (Islam and Deegan, 2008). Clarkson (1995) classified
stakeholder groups as primary or private and secondary or public stakeholders. Primary
stakeholders include those that the corporation depends on for its survival, whereas secondary
stakeholders are not directly engaged with the companies, and are not essential for its survival.
The primary stakeholder groups included in this present study are; shareholders, employees, and
customers.
The findings of past studies that examine the relationship between stakeholders’ attributes and
corporate disclosure related to ESG factors are somewhat mixed. Some suggest a positive
relationship (Kamal, Brown, Sivabalan, and Sundin, 2015; Dong, Burritt, and Qian, 2014;
Mishra and Suar, 2010; Boesso and Kumar, 2009a). However, Agle et al. (1999) found no
significant relationship between stakeholders’ salience and corporate social performance. These
findings would provide an opportunity for better understanding of stakeholders’ salience and
ESG disclosure with an inclusion of corporate characteristics. Robert (1992) and Dong et al.
(2014) investigated corporate age as a control variable on the basis that age is related to
stakeholders’ salience and ESG practices. Older companies with longer societal existence may
have taken relatively more ESG practices. According to Yang (2009), these companies usually
have longer performance experience and histories, and are mature. As a company operates
longer, there will be more communication needed to their stakeholders, and wide social networks
are required to build public images (Yang, 2009). However, Dong et al. (2014) reported that
company age does not significantly influence ESG disclosure.
The preceding discussion shows that the relationship between stakeholders’ attributes and ESG
disclosure could be understood from various corporate characteristics, particularly CLC. In other
words, CLC may act as moderating variables in empirical tests regarding social responsibility
practices as suggested by Roberts (1992). Roberts (1992) argued that corporate age is a macro-
level proxy and represents some part of stakeholders’ perspective towards social responsibility.
At different CLC stages, companies employ different strategies to manage their stakeholders
(Jawahar and McLaughlin, 2001). Thus, different CLC stages affect managers’ perceptions
towards stakeholders’ attributes and subsequently impact on companies’ strategy, in particular
ESG disclosure. In supporting this view, Roberts (1992) proposed that CLC stages might have a
role as a moderating variable in empirical examination relating to social responsible matters.
Moreover, this potential impact of CLC on the relationship between stakeholders’ attributes and
ESG disclosure relatively received little attention. Hence, this present study attempts to examine

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the role of CLC in moderating the relationship between primary stakeholders’ attributes and ESG
disclosure.

Literature Review
Stakeholders Attributes and ESG Disclosure
There were past researches that studied on the influence of stakeholders’ attributes towards ESG
disclosure. For example the influence of power (Lu and Abeysekera, 2014); legitimacy (Cormier
and Magnan, 2015), and urgency (Mishra and Suar, 2010) towards corporate disclosure.
Additionally, there were also studies that focusing on a particular attributes of specific
stakeholder such as Elijido-ten (2009) who examined corporate environmental disclosure from a
developing country perspective and found that only government power was significant, whereas
shareholder’s power and creditor’s power were not. Similarly, Sweeney and Coughlan (2008)
found that shareholder’s and creditor’s power are not related to corporate social and
environmental disclosure. Meanwhile, (Lu and Abeysekera, 2014) revealed that various powerful
stakeholders in China are found to be generally weak in influencing corporate social and
environmental disclosure. Generally, companies provide ESG related information to conform
and to satisfy powerful stakeholders’ expectations and demands (Kamal and Deegan, 2013).
Generally, salience or priority given to certain stakeholders potentially influence companies to
report information related to ESG factors. For instance, Boesso and Kumar (2009b) provided
some evidence to the effect that the greater the priority accorded to a stakeholder group, the
greater the relevant voluntary disclosure made in the annual report. Some other studies specify
particular salient stakeholders in relation to practices and disclosure information related to ESG
factors. Gago and Antolin (2004) found that government is considered the most salient
stakeholders because of the greater power which the government possesses to impose
environmental actions, the higher legitimacy to do so and the fact that environmental demands
are more urgent. On the other hand, supplier is the least salient stakeholder groups due to their
minimal role in environmental decisions. Meanwhile, Boesso and Kumar (2009b), reported that
salience of labour, customer and financial groups influenced the disclosure of certain key
performance indicators. However, similar results were not found to group of social and
environmental, professional and industry. Meanwhile, Mishra and Suar (2010) found that the
salience of all stakeholder groups (i.e. employees, customers, investors, community, natural
environment, and suppliers) enhanced the corresponding corporate social responsibility. Dong et
al., (2014) revealed that international consumers were considered as salient stakeholders with a
significant impact towards corporations. The results suggest that to maintain a competitive edge,
companies need to provide sufficient CSR information and therefore allow the international
community to monitor their corporate performance against these concerns.
This present study includes stakeholders’ attributes of power, legitimacy, and urgency. There
were past studies evidenced the relationship between stakeholder attributes and stakeholders
salience (Agle et al, 1999; and Parent and Deephouse, 2007). Gago and Antolin (2004) reported
that environmental power, legitimacy and urgency give a positive impact towards environmental
salience. In fact, stakeholder salience is a key concept for understanding the corporate disclosure
(Pérez, López, and María del Mar García-De los Salmones, 2017).

Corporate Life Cycle

A company is likely to use various strategies to deal with different stakeholder groups (Jawahar
and McLaughlin, 2001) including meeting stakeholders’ needs in relation to ESG factors. ESG
disclosure is one way to meet stakeholders’ needs for corporate information. In addition,
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companies are likely to not only use different strategies to deal with different stakeholders but
also to use different strategies to deal with the same stakeholder groups and in different stages of
the corporate life cycle (CLC) (Jawahar and McLaughlin, 2001). Based on the premise that
companies faced different pressures and threats at different stages of the CLC, Jawahar and
McLaughlin developed a descriptive stakeholder theory. They set out how a company focuses on
particular stakeholders in each stage of its CLC. The model implies that, at each stage interests of
different stakeholder groups will not be equally attended to, but a company prioritise groups that
are particularly important at that stage. In other words, stage of the CLC will affect assessments
of stakeholders’ attributes. For example, investors are crucial at start-up and customers are at
their most salient at the mature stage.
Each CLC stage imply integral interdependent among situation, strategy, structure and decision
making styles in which each stage exhibits certain significant difference (Miller and Friesen,
1984). They suggested five stages of CLC namely birth, growth, maturity, revival and decline
stage. Other than that, prior studies have used age and size as common CLC stage measure
(Moores and Yuen, 2001). Companies that are older and have greater stakeholder orientation are
more likely to have a larger incentive to report social factors (Dhaliwal et al., 2014; and Roberts,
1992). However, Dong et al. (2014) did not find similar results. From the review of various
studies, Uhlaner, Wright and Huse (2007) revealed the importance of understanding several
dimensions of the context in which the companies operate and one of the dimensions is the
impact of CLC. They suggested that governance codes should be developed in a flexible manner
and to take account of the different types of governance needs of companies at different stages of
CLC because governance requirements of companies are not homogeneous but may be expected
to vary over the different phases of a CLC. Apart from that, company which likely to move from
growth to maturity stage invest more in organization capital (Monzur and Cheung, 2018) and
corporate policies follow their CLC stages (Faff, Chun, Podolski, and Wong, 2016).
The variation in how companies deal with different stakeholders in relation to ESG factors,
simultaneously and across life cycle stages has little been addressed in the extant literature. Thus,
the potential impact of CLC on the link between stakeholders’ attributes and ESG disclosure, and
the relatively slight attention received in the literature, provides an opportunity for this present
study to include CLC as one of the moderating factor.

Theoretical Framework and Hypothesis Development

Mitchell et al., (1997) presents a theory of stakeholder identification and salience which suggests
that, managers' perceptions of three key stakeholder attributes namely power, legitimacy, and
urgency would affect stakeholder salience. Salience is defined as the degree to which managers
give priority to competing stakeholder claims (Agle et al., 1999). This theory produces a
comprehensive typology of stakeholders based on the normative assumption that these variables
define the field of stakeholders those are entities to whom managers should pay attention to.
Mitchell et al. (1997) argued that stakeholders’ power influence the corporate's behavior,
whether or not it has a legitimate claim. They also argued that, an emphasis on the legitimacy of
a claim on a company, based upon, for example, contract, exchange, legal title, legal right, moral
right, at risk status, or moral interest in the harms and benefits generated by company actions, is
required in order to narrow the definition of stakeholders. Power and legitimacy are defined as
core attributes that are expected to affect stakeholder’s salience (Agle et al., 1999). Meanwhile,
attribute of urgency is the degree to which a stakeholder's claim calls for immediate attention.

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The inclusion of urgency adds a dynamic component to the process whereby stakeholders attain
salience in the minds of managers (Mitchell et al., 1997).
CLC or age is a macro-level proxy for aspects of stakeholder power and strategic posture toward
social responsibility activities. Companies that are older and have greater stakeholder orientation
are more likely to have a larger incentive to disclose issues related to ESG (Dhaliwal et al., 2014;
and Roberts, 1992). In contrast, Dong et al. (2014) found that companies’ age do not influence
CSR reporting by Chinese mining companies. Robert (1992) suggests that corporate age may act
as moderating variable in empirical tests concerning social responsibility activities. This study
will extend an additional work as it is needed to improve the understanding of the empirical
relationship between corporate age, stakeholder salience and ESG disclosure. Moreover, Jawahar
and McLaughlin (2001) claim that companies provide different level of attention to their
stakeholders at various stages of the companies’ life cycle or age. Hence, this prior literatures
provide an interesting avenue for this study to consider the moderating impact of CLC on the
relationship between stakeholder salience and the ESG disclosure. The following hypothesis is
proposed:

H1: Corporate life cycle moderates the relationship between stakeholder power and ESG
disclosure.
H2: Corporate life cycle moderates the relationship between stakeholder legitimacy and ESG
disclosure.
H3: Corporate life cycle moderates the relationship between stakeholder urgency and ESG
disclosure.

Method
After all the necessary actions have been taken, only sixty eight usable questionnaires were
collected out of 559 questionnaires distributed to the top management of companies listed on the
main board of Bursa Malaysia which centrally located in urban location, Klang Valley. The
response rate of 12.2 percent is notably low and is considered as the limitation of this study.
Questionnaire survey is one of the most widely used approach because of the ability to deal with
a large sample size (Saunders, Lewis, and Thornhill, 2012). A number of past research utilised
questionnaire survey to examine the managers perceptions towards corporate disclosure (Fifka,
2012) due to their direct involvement in the disclosure process (O’Donovan, 2002). The state of
corporate managers perceptions towards the important of information to be reported indicates
and contributes to corporate social responsible concerns and awareness (Ahmed and Hussainey,
2010) and subsequently, would enhance corporate participation in corporate reporting and
practice (Loulou-Baklouti and Triki, 2018).
Part one of the questionnaire contains a list of indicators for E, S and G factors. Each indicator is
rated based on the level of importance of disclosure in corporate disclosure medium, limited to
corporate annual report and sustainability or CSR report. Corporate annual reports and CSR or
sustainability reports were considered because those reports are important and publicly available
for corporate stakeholders (Van Staden and Hooks, 2007). Each of the factor was treated
individually and the integrative measure is performed with the aid of fuzzy logic approach (see
Buniamin, Nik Ahmad and Zakaria, 2016). Integrative concept is defined as an equitable (Kleine
and Hauff, 2009) and simultaneous (Gao and Bansal, 2013) attention for each ESG factors to be
practiced and reported. Meanwhile, part two comprises questions that captured stakeholders’
power, legitimacy and urgency in which relate more closely to managers’ observation within a

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current year of tenure. The questions were adapted from Boesso and Kumar (2009); Agle et al.
(1999) and Mitchell et al. (1997). In part three, respondents were asked to select the CLC stage
most closely describing their companies. Similar to Kazanjian and Drazin (1990) who developed
a self-categorisation questionnaire based on items that correspond to CLC stages and judged by
CEOs. The description for each stage is summarized in Table 1 based on the descriptions of
Jawahar and McLaughlin (2001); Miller and Friesen (1984); and Quinn and Cameron (1983).

Table: 1 Descriptions of CLC Stages

Stage CLC stage Description
Company is actively seeking and engaged in expansion opportunities
1 Growth
such as in investment, number of employees, and geographical contacts
2 Mature Company regarded as successful, respected leaders and role models
Company start to reassess the strategies currently in use for example
3 Revival
mergers, downsizing, and layoffs to ensure companies’ survival

Findings and Discussions

Table 2 presents the results of the two-stage hierarchical multiple regression. In model 1,
stakeholders’ attributes and moderating variable (i.e CLC) were included in the model. In order
to avoid potentially problematic multicollinearity with the interaction term, the variables were
centered and an interaction terms between stakeholders’ attributes and CLC were created and
were then added in model 2. The moderating effects were analysed for each of the relationship
between stakeholders’ attributes power (P), legitimacy (L), and urgency (U) of three (3)
stakeholders; shareholders (Sh), employees (Em), and customers (Cu) with ESG disclosure. The
interactions effects were tested using the F-test associated with R square changes (∆R2).
In Table 2, significant moderator effects of CLC were found for the relationship between ESG
and LEm and UEm. For LEm, without the interaction in model 1, the effect was insignificant.
However, with the interaction term in model 2, accounted for significantly more variance than
just CLC and LEm with R2 change of 0.041 at significant p value < 0.05. Similarly, for UEm,
model 1 shows insignificant relationship but provide a significant more variance with interaction
term in model 2 than without interaction term in model 1 with R2 change of 0.054 at significant p
value < 0.05. This indicates that there is potentially significant moderation effects of CLC on the
relationship between LEm and UEm with ESG.

Table 2: Regression of ESG, stakeholders’ attributes, CLC and the interaction

Power (P) Legitimacy (L) Urgency (U)
Step
Model ∆R2 ∆F Model ∆R2 ∆F Model ∆R2 ∆F
1 PSh LSh USh
CLC .062 2.158 CLC .048 1.632 CLC .055 1.897
2 PSh*CLC .005 .315 LSh*CLC .020 1.352 USh*CLC .004 .242
1 PEm LEm UEm
CLC .030 .996 CLC .076 2.677 CLC .061 2.129
2 PEm*CLC .021 1.439 LEm*CLC .041 3.003* UEm*CLC .054 3.914*
1 PCu LCu UCu
CLC .028 .943 CLC .044 1.484 CLC .043 1.462
2 PCu*CLC .019 1.260 LCu*CLC .007 .439 UCu*CLC .003 .194
*Significant at p<0.05

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The add-on PROCESS by Hayes (2013) was used to interpret the potentially significant
moderation between CLC, LEm and UEm on ESG practices. The findings are illustrated in
Figure 1 and 2.

Growth Mature Revival

100
(ESG)

50

0
Low Average High
Legitimacy of employee (LEm

Figure 1: Interaction of CLC on the Relationship between ESG and LEm

Growth Mature Revival

80
60
(ESG)

40
20
0
Low Average High
Urgency of employee (uem)
Figure 2: Interaction of CLC on the Relationship between ESG and UEm
Figure 1 and 2 plot the graph for the interaction of CLC on the relationship of ESG disclosure
with LEm and UEm respectively. The graphs display the stakeholders attribute (i.e. LEm and
UEm) along the x-axis and the moderating variable (i.e. CLC) is depicted with three lines
designated for growth, mature and revival life cycles. The line of the interactions was plotted
using predicted values for ESG based on representative level at the mean (average), 1 standard
deviation above mean (high), and 1 standard deviation below (low) the mean for perception level
on LEm and UEm according to growth, mature and revival CLC. Both, Figure 1 and 2 provide a
quite similar result. The ESG disclosure increases when the perception of the LEm and UEm
increases for growth, mature and revival life cycle. In addition, the highest ESG disclosure
reported for revival companies, followed by mature and growth companies at low and average
level of perceptions on LEm and UEm. Consistent with Dhaliwal et al. (2014) and Roberts
(1992), who reported that companies that are older or at revival CLC stage have greater
stakeholder orientation and are more likely to disclose issues related to ESG. Companies at this
stage, start to reassess their strategies to ensure companies’ survival. Thus, perceived high
employees legitimacy and urgency on ESG matter at this stage is crucial. ESG disclosure is
seemed important to keep them informed and thus, maintain a good relationship and remain their
performance. Mallin et al. (2012) reported a significant positive relationship between employees’

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performance and the extent of disclosure. In particular, employees are most relevant to social
issues such as health and safety at work, development of workers’ skills, well-being and
satisfaction of worker, quality of work and social equity.
Furthermore, the line for three CLC stages meet at an intersection when they reached at high
perceived of LEm and UEm. Surprisingly, the CLC’s line then, turned to the opposite whereby,
at high level of perceptions on LEm and UEM, the highest ESG disclosure was reported for
growth companies, followed by mature and revival companies. In another words, managers in
growth life cycle companies perceived ESG disclosure better than companies in mature and
revival life cycle when they highly perceived on employees’ legitimacy and urgency. In line with
descriptive stakeholder theory developed by Jawahar and McLaughlin (2001), a company
prioritise their stakeholder groups that are particularly important at different CLC stage. Thus,
the findings of this present study suggest that, employee with legitimacy and urgency attributes
are perceived to be more important at revival stage than growth or mature CLC stage with regard
to the ESG disclosure.

Conclusion
The application of stakeholder identification and salience theory (Mitchell et al., 1997) can
provide managers a useful tool to better identify and understand the influence of primary
stakeholders’ attributes on a corporate's activities in particular reporting ESG information.
Moreover, this present study contributes to the understanding stakeholders’ relationship with
regard to ESG disclosure in different CLC stages. The study has a number of limitations which
should be taken into account when considering the results. Firstly, according to Mitchell et al.
(1997), stakeholder salience could be unpredictable because each attribute of stakeholder power,
legitimacy and urgency, is changeable for any particular entity across time. This present study
only examines the influences of attributes for different stakeholder groups over the ESG
disclosure based on data collected in one point of time. Therefore, future studies could examine
how stakeholders’ attributes changes over a longer period of time to capture on how changes of
the stakeholders’ attributes across different points of time. Secondly, this study addresses the
managers perceptions on the importance of ESG disclosure based on the stakeholders attributes
which only include three primary stakeholder groups, they are shareholders, employees and
customers. Hence, future research could also be furthered by including some other potential
stakeholder groups such as interest group, non-governmental organisations, analysts and supplier
who are not investigated.

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