Reporting on sustainable development: Configurational effects of top management team and corporate characteristics on environmental information disclosure

Although widely explored in many studies, how and why combined top management team (TMT) and corporate characteristics affect environmental information disclosures (EID) are still lacking clarity. This study uses both fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and necessary condition analysis to reconcile the inconclusive results concerning the configurational effects of these characteristics on EID and to validate the robustness. From a sample of listed construction engineering corporates during the 2014-2018 period, the high EID level is associated with several complex configurations that contain the core characteristics such as corporate ownership and size, whereas the low EID level is related to the configurations including TMT salary and corporate profitability. The findings support the four tenets of equifinality, asymmetry, complexity, and causal asymmetry in complexity theory. Our results capture the complex non-linear effects of TMT and corporate characteristics and shed new light on environmental disclosure management for corporate sustainable development.