CEO's International Characteristics and Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

The high disclosure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in overseas countries, especially in Europe and the United States, was the motivation for this study to obtain empirical evidence on whether CEOs’ international characteristics influence CSR activity disclosure to firms in Indonesia. This study aims to analyze the influence of CEOs who have experience working abroad, CEOs who have educational background abroad, and CEOs who have foreign citizenship on the disclosure of CSR. The sample in this study is 139 companies in the manufacturing industry listed on Indonesia Stock Exchange in 2016. This research analyzes companies’ annual reports by using a content analysis method based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G4 index. The results of this study indicate that to increase the level of CSR disclosure, companies in Indonesia can consider the international characteristics of the CEO, namely, the CEO’s experience working abroad and the CEO’s educational background abroad, when choosing a CEO because these factors affected CSR disclosure in Indonesia. Notably, foreign citizenship of CEOs did not affect CSR disclosure in Indonesia. Keywords—Corporate social responsibility (CSR), CEO, experience working abroad, educational background abroad, foreign citizenship, GRI G4