Designing of Corporates’ Coherent Sustainability Reporting Model

Due to the expansion of business activities in the world and the importance of sustainability in the organizational, academic and professional levels, sustainability is among the first goals of countries and companies. But Iran has paid less attention to this issue. In other words, there are currently causal, intervening, and context conditions, the strategies and consequences of this type of reporting have not been investigated. Therefore, in this research, we have attempted to design a coherent corporate sustainability reporting model based on the grounded theory. This research is qualitative and exploratory. This study is conducted through profound interviews with experts in the field of theoretical literature of financial reporting and social sciences, capital market, organization, industry, mining, trade, and environmental protection organization. By conducting 23 interviews in 2019 using snowball sampling. The results of the research show that the main Causal conditions that lead to sustainability reporting are environmental requirements, environmental incentives, environmental pressures, country’s cultural and social characteristics, the country's political characteristics and the international environment’s characteristics. Research findings also show that in order to achieve sustainability reporting, strategies should be developed such as identifying the entity responsible for sustainability, formulating principles and sustainability standards, establishing a sustainability and social responsibility committee in companies, familiarizing and training sustainability, establishing an internal control and effective reporting system and use new technologies are being adopted. Finally, a coherent research model show that corporate sustainability reporting could have implications such as increasing social trust, increasing the human life quality, preserving the environment for future generations, increasing capital markets, and increasing reporting quality. The findings of this study could help to develop this kind of report in Iran.