The Relationship between Corporate Human Rights Responsibility Disclosure and Performance

Corporate Human Rights Responsibility (CHRR) has gained considerable attention in recent discussions of business and regulation. Consistent with prior research on corporate legitimacy, a growing number of companies has begun disclosing CHRR information in annual reports. However, it has not been identified whether the voluntary disclosure of CHRR indeed leads to actual improvements in CHRR performance levels. This study examines the relationship between CHRR disclosure and performance using data on the largest 1,000 Korean companies from 2006 to 2014. Given the lack of prior empirical research on CHRR measurement, this study uses the number of complaints received by the National Labor Relations Commission in South Korea as the measure of the human rights performances of each company. The CHRR disclosure is scored using the self-reported labor and human rights data in annual reports with the format of Global Reporting Initiative Guidelines. The empirical results show that CHRR performance is not consistently associated with the disclosure of human rights reports. Nevertheless, this study finds that only reporting in compliance with international guidelines affects human rights performances.