Human resource disclosures in UK corporate annual reports: To what extent do these reflect organisational priorities towards labour?

Our study analyses the nature, quality and extent of human resource disclosures (HRDs) of UK Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 firms by relying on a novel disclosure index measuring the depth and breadth of disclosures. Contextually, we focus on the five-year period following the then Labour government’s attempts to encourage firms to formally report on their human resource management practices and to foster deeper employer-employee engagement. First, we evaluate the degree to which companies report comprehensively (or substantively) on a number of HRD items that we classify as “procedural” or “sustainable.” Second, we hypothesise that a company’s employee relation ideology (using a proxy to measure a company’s level of “unitarism”) is positively associated with HRD. Our results indicate that: (i) whilst there has been an increase in the breadth of HRD in terms of procedural and sustainable items being disclosed, the evolution towards a more comprehensive and in-depth form of HRD remains rather limited; and (ii) there is a positive association between a company’s employee relation ideology (unitarism) and the level of HRD. Theoretically, we conceive of HRD both as a reflection of an organisation’s orientation towards a key stakeholder (unitarist relations with labour) and a legitimacy seeking exercise at a time of changing societal conditions. We contribute to the scant literature on the extent and determinants of HRD since prior research tends to subsume employee-related disclosures within the broader concept of social, ethical or intellectual capital disclosures. We also propose a disclosure checklist to underpin future HRD research.