The relationship of companies' environmental sustainability performance and the level of information voluntary disclosure quality

The present paper has examined the relationship between environmental sustainability performance with quality of voluntary disclosure of 71 different companies during the period of 2012 to 2018 (total number of 497 year-company). In order to measure the environmental sustainability performance and voluntary disclosure of these companies, a content analysis of the board of directors’ reports was conducted. With this end in view, a checklist, consisting of 5 environmental sustainability performance components and 16 voluntary disclosure components, was prepared, and the multivariate regression method was used to test the research hypotheses. The research findings indicated that 279 year-company disclosed their information with high quality, compared with 218 year-company that provided their information with low quality. In other words, most of the investigated companies disclosed their information with significant disclosure. Moreover, it was notable that there was a statistically significant relationship between the high- and low-quality voluntary disclosed information and environmental sustainability performance of the investigated companies. The results also revealed that, based on the theory of voluntary disclosure, the superior sustainability performers preferred to disclose the information with high quality to demonstrate their performance superiority over the market, whereas based on the legitimacy theory, poor sustainability performers used low quality information disclosure to simultaneously conceal their actual performance and protect their justifications.