An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Top Management Team Characteristics And Corporate Social Responsibility Information Disclosure

Under the background of economic globalization, corporations are facing increasingly fierce competition. Compared with the simple product quality and price competition, overall responsibility competition has become the key to corporations to gain competitive advantages. Meanwhile, corporations are not only an economic organization, but also social organizations that carrying the mankind survival and society development. They have profound influence on the overall social economic development and sustainable development. When corporations pursuit the maximizing of their own interests, if they can meet the reasonable demands of stakeholders and bear corresponding responsibilities, then they can create a stable environment for the society and provide a guarantee for sustainable development. Theoretical and practical circles are both very concerned about disclosure quality of the corporate social responsibility information. The past researches on the influence factors of the corporate social responsibility information disclosure mainly concentrated in the corporate characteristics, governance, and mainly ignored the specific role of top management team. The strategies of a corporation are mainly from the top management team. Therefore this paper researches about corporate social responsibility information disclosure problems from the angle of top management team.This paper is based on upper echelons and stakeholders theory, and inspired by the strategic leadership, social responsibility strategy and sustainable competitiveness. Starting from the top management team characteristics which is an internal factor, this paper combine the top management team characteristics and social responsibility information disclosure through theoretical deduction, and then found the relationship between top management team characteristics and social responsibility information disclosure. At first, choosing the Shanghai listing Corporations which have released the2011year corporate social responsibility report as the total sample, then after a series of screening, finally this paper get313listing corporation data as the sample of this study. Team characteristics include6aspects, which are team size, age, level of education, political background, and the international background and the social reputation. This paper also has controlled some other influencing factors of corporate social responsibility information disclosure. Applying OLS, this study find that: top management team size, political background, the international background and social reputation have significantly positive effects on corporate social responsibility information disclosure; the corporate social responsibility information disclosure is positively affected by the level of education, but not significantly; the corporate social responsibility information disclosure is negatively affected by the age, but not significantly. Finally, according to the research results, this paper put forward some suggestions about how to improve disclosure quality of the social responsibility information.