A Study On The Effect Of Impression Management In Corporate Social Responsibility Report

In the context of corporate social responsibility activities and information disclosure aregaining increasing concern, this paper takes the corporate social responsibility reports ascarriers, and analyzes the impression management behavior in corporate social informationdisclosure. Further, this paper exams the effect and its mechanism of two special impressionmanagement methods in corporate social responsibility reports: quantitative information andpicture.In the process of research, this paper constructs an experiment with the part-time MBAstudents as subjects. The experimental results show that, when there is more quantitativeinformation in the corporate social responsibility report, the readers will make better evaluationon the corporate’s social responsibility performance; when there are pictures in the report, thereaders will make better evaluation on the corporate’s social responsibility performance, either.It indicates that these two impression management methods have the ability to affect readers’cognition and evaluation.In the terms of action mechanism, the experimental results suggest that, the quantitativeinformation effects readers’ evaluation of the corporate’s social responsibility performance byimproving the persuasiveness of information; the pictures effect readers’ evaluation byenhancing the readability of the report.Through the application of impression management theory, this paper extends the researchon corporate social information disclosure to the respect of information transfer processes anddelivery mechanisms, and enriches the understanding of corporate social information receiver’scognitive processes. Meanwhile, this paper suggests approaches for corporations to improve thequality of their corporate social responsibility reports.