Does it pay to be sustainable? Looking inside the black box of the relationship between sustainability performance and financial performance

Abstract

Abstract The last three decades have witnessed a huge amount of research exploring the linkage between companies' sustainability performance (SP), sustainability disclosure and financial performance (FP). Researchers have applied various methods and techniques to investigate this relationship, yet the results remain equivocal. In this article, we look inside this black box by considering various manifestations of sustainability practices and investigating their link with FP. We apply a manual content analysis technique to analyse the sustainability reports of the 100 best‐performing US firms. Our results reveal that fragmentation in the results is caused by the SP measurement. Additionally, we note that the interlinkages between different SP dimensions and sub‐dimensions are weak and somewhat contradictory. The results help draw important policy implications for the development of an SP reporting framework.

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