Broad or Narrow Stakeholder Management? A Signaling Theory Perspective

Limin Fu · Dirk Michael Boehe · Marc Orlitzky

78 citations0/0 files storedBusiness & Society

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting Environmental Sustainability in Business Corporate Identity and Reputation

Abstract

To mitigate risk, should companies signal a broad range of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives or instead focus on only a few ESG issues? Drawing on signaling theory, we propose that a broad array of ESG initiatives generates not only signal consistency but also accelerating signal costs. Our empirical results support the resultant hypothesis of a curvilinear relationship between ESG scope and equity risk. In addition, this U-shaped curve seems to become steeper when firms face multiple media-reported ESG controversies. Overall, our study qualifies the conventional wisdom that firms can reduce equity risk by attending to a wide variety of stakeholders and highlights the moderating (signal-amplifying) impact of the firm’s media environment.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 78 citations exist upstream.

References

1978Specification Tests in Econometrics 1992The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns 1973Job Market Signaling 1993The cornerstones of competitive advantage: A resource‐based view 1995A Stakeholder Framework for Analyzing and Evaluating Corporate Social Performance 2003Corporate Social and Financial Performance: A Meta-Analysis 2001Corporate Social Responsibility: A Theory of the Firm Perspective 1993The myopia of learning

Cited by

2023ESG Leaders or Laggards? A Configurational Analysis of ESG Performance 2024The Impact of Environmental, Social, and Governance Disclosure on the Performance of Saudi Arabian Companies: Evidence from the Top 100 Non-Financial Companies Listed on Tadawul 2025Operations & supply chain management: principles and practice 2025Does ESG rating divergence affect the cost of corporate debt?2022Why Bad News Can Be Good News: The Signaling Feedback Effect of Negative Media Coverage of Corporate Irresponsibility

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.