PhD Sustainability Academy
INSEAD, France
Can “Radical Transparency” Improve the Credibility of Corporate Sustainability Efforts? A Randomized Experiment
Abstract
Prior research suggests that companies withhold information from their stakeholders that is
potentially harmful to their reputation. We study the impact of “radical transparency,” or the
voluntary disclosure of such information to a degree that exceeds established standards, by
analyzing results of a field experiment that randomly assigns transparency conditions on an
online labor platform. We find that certain personality traits of workers, such as charitability,
impact-orientation and skepticism, significantly influence workers’ voluntary effort under
different disclosure strategies including radical transparency alone, selective disclosures (CSR)
alone and combined radical transparency with relevant CSR efforts. Workers’ perception of the
employer in terms of credibility, transparency and accountability had a mediating effect between different disclosure strategies and workers’ voluntary effort. Our paper highlights the critical importance of stakeholder heterogeneity in how companies derive motivational benefits from different corporate sustainability disclosure strategies.
Biography
Anna Szerb is a PhD candidate in the Strategic Management department of INSEAD. Anna’s
main research interest lies in examining the relationship between a corporate purpose beyond
profitability and stakeholders’ responses in terms of willingness to provide resources for the
organization. Her dissertation focuses specifically on the impact of balancing social and
commercial goals on the organizational level—including the consistency between stated and
pursued purpose as well as different disclosure strategies—on employees’ resource provision for the company. She also explores how this relationship influences the ability of socially driven business organizations to scale. Anna aims to contribute to the corporate purpose and stakeholder governance literatures by taking a microfoundational perspective and using experimental methods. Before joining the PhD program, Anna worked as a management consultant in the life sciences industry, which continues to motivate her to better understand the role of businesses in society through her research.
Anna Szerb
