The relationship between the level of a corporation’s public disclosure of its managerial values and its level of organizational authenticity

Purpose: This study aims to explore if corporations that publicly disclose more information about their managerial values are also more organizationally authentic in enacting these values. Design/methodology/approach: A maturity model of managerial values is used that ordinally ranks a corporation’s level of managerial values enactment using corporate annual reports. The samples of corporations’ corporate reports are qualitatively content analyzed, and the outcomes are statistically tested. Findings: The findings indicate that as an organization voluntarily discloses more information about its corporate values, it tends to be more likely to enact their espoused values, and their corporation’s level of organizational authenticity increases. Originality/value: This study suggests an approach to benchmark a corporation’s level of organizational authenticity using public information, and by doing so, contributes to both policy and practice by offering a framework to compare organizational authenticity between public corporations by their sector, size or the age of the corporation.