Obfuscation versus enhancement as corporate social responsibility disclosure strategies

Building upon impression management, the objective of this paper is to analyse the enhancement or obfuscation strategies of reporting corporate social responsibility (CSR) information. Concretely, this paper aims to examine the association between the CSR performance of the firm and the socially responsible disclosure strategy adopted by managers to obtain insights into the factors associated with balance, accuracy, clarity, comparability, and reliability of information. A sample of 273 international companies from the year 2007 to 2014 was used to develop our models of analysis. The results show that, according to an obfuscation disclosure strategy, firms with the worst CSR performance disclose information that is less balanced, accurate, and clear; moreover, these reports incorporate more optimistic, longer, and less readable information. Within the realm of impression‐management strategy, firms use thematic content and verbal tone manipulation as well as quantity and syntactical reading as impression‐management tools.