Sustainable development: The role of sustainability committees in achieving ESG targets

Aso Abdullah, Sibel Yamak, Anna Korzhenitskaya, Roya Rahimi and Jeanette McClellan

Business Strategy and the Environment, 2024, vol. 33, issue 3, 2250-2268

Abstract: This study investigating the impact of sustainability committee characteristics (SCCs) on corporate sustainability performance (CSP) utilised environmental, social and governance (ESG) scoring. Based on secondary data obtained from Refinitiv, Fame and FTSE 150 databases, the sample consists of 112 non‐financial companies from 2010 to 2018, thus 926 firm‐year observations. The results reveal a positive and significant relationship between organisational factors including firm size, profitability and firm age across combined ESG and environmental scores. As for the sustainability committee characteristics, there is a positive association between frequency of committee meeting and age diversity with governance scores and a negative relationship between frequency of committee meeting and environmental performance. The empirical finding shows positive and negative relationships under the presence of focussed and non‐focussed committees equally. Furthermore, the presence of focussed or non‐focussed sustainability committees (SCs) do appear to have an association with the overall CSP. Furthermore, this paper provides empirical evidence of the insignificant relationship of SCC with the sub‐dimension of social performance, which contradicts our hypothesis and existing studies. Together with SCC's weak associations with environment and governance dimensions, this finding supports the argument that firms are actively using sustainability committees to create positive public image and reputation to protect legitimacy.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.3596

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:bstrat:v:33:y:2024:i:3:p:2250-2268

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1002/(ISSN)1099-0836

Access Statistics for this article

Business Strategy and the Environment is currently edited by Richard Welford

More articles in Business Strategy and the Environment from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().