Il principio di materialità nella social-environmental disclosure. Il ruolo dello stakeholder engagement

This work represents an evolution of a previous research already published in 2018 on Rivista Italiana di Ragioneria e di Economia Aziendale (TORELLI ET AL., 2018) and aims to investigate, under the lens of Stakeholder Theory and Instrumental Stakeholder Theory, the possible relationship between the application of materiality principle in non financial reports and the engagement of stakeholders. Materiality is one of the most significant principle for companies that desire to disclose their CSR. Companies, in-fact, can identify and select issues to be included and treated in integrated and sustainability reports favouring expectations and needs of all the stakeholders through this principle. Such needs are to be carefully considered because no organization is expected to disclose about all sustainability issues, but the report should cover aspects that reflect the companies’ significant economic, environmental and social impacts. In this respect, the importance of the stakeholder engagement process appears. The direct or indirect engagement of all stakeholders allows the company to properly understand the stakeholder’s expectations and needs and, in this sense, make the companies able to correctly arrange the report. Although Stakeholder Theory (FREEMAN, 1984) and Instrumental Stakeholder Theory (JONES, 1995) are a widely used theories in this field of research and the need to meet as more as possible the information requests and expectation of all the stakeholder groups is highly investigated, the process of engagement of these stakeholders has not been deeply analysed. We aim to fill the gap of investigation about the possible contribution that different level of stakeholder engagement could bring to the process of materiality analysis and then to the related production of non-financial reports. We have subjected to a manual content analysis all sustainability/integrated reports published in the years 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 following guidelines of GRI and IIRC by Italian listed companies (for a total of 148 reports). The statistical analysis highlights, as research finding, the importance of stakeholder engagement in the reporting process, in particular in the materiality analysis, to achieve a high level of materiality application and a good report quality for stakeholders.