Human Resources Disclosure by the Largest Czech Companies

Importance of sustainable approach to entrepreneurship is growing. Hand in hand with this trend importance of sustainability reporting, which includes reporting on human resources, also increases. In this paper we examine the existence and extent of reporting on human resources in annual reports of the largest companies domiciled in the Czech Republic, which belong to selected industrial sectors. We also investigate which firm characteristics (size, listing status, industry) are potential determinants of the level of disclosure on human resources practices. To fulfil our goals we utilized methods of content analysis and linear regression. In total 45 annual reports were examined. We found that at least some information related to human resources is disclosed in each of these reports. Nevertheless the amount of disclosed information is often very superficial and organizations do not use any standards or guidelines for non-financial reporting. Comparison of the published annual reports with requirements defined by the GRI Guidelines version 4 highlighted how little information on human resources is published by majority of organizations. Regarding potential determinants of level of disclosure, our results show that organization size (measured by number of employees) and listing status (i.e. ownership type) have a significant positive association with composite disclosure index on human resources (CDI). On the contrary, industry had no influence on level of disclosure.