Reputation Drivers in Oil and Gas Sector

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how do companies leverage on their sustainability reports for enhancing their reputation. Is the current reporting is consistent with what found in literature for the drivers that affect reputation.

Design/methodology/approach: A literature of reputation is reviewed with the aim of determining the most relevant drivers that affect reputation. Afterwards these drivers are translated in to elements that can be investigated and used in the content analysis. A qualitative content analysis is applied to the sustainability reports of the top 13 companies in global fortune 500 list operating in the oil gas sector. The content analysis provides information on 32 elements which are constituting the reputational driver model which was developed. The content analysis framework will check the existence of the elements through a scorecard that was developed. The scorecard requires three types of information for each disclosed element. These areas are (i) vision and goals, (ii) management approach, and (iii) performance indicators.

Findings: The content analysis reveals a low level of comprehensive reporting in the areas of "vision and aims" and "performance indicators", while the "management approach" area is performing good enough among most of the companies explored. As expected, the companies achieved the highest score in reporting for the drivers of "Environment" and "Safety" . Still some drivers are not very well covered such as the "regulatory compliance" and "Delivering customer promise". Within each driver , there are still some elements that are badly reported or not mentioned in the reports of some companies although their importance. The study revealed some differences which can be more investigated about differences in reporting between companies operating substantially outside their home location and companies operating substantially within their countries of origin.

Conclusion: Companies should pay more attention for the comprehensiveness of their sustainability reports by disclosing focused and relevant information for their stakeholders on the 3 areas of disclosures defined in the content analysis. Stakeholders are increasingly demanding more information. Therefore, companies should increasingly engage with stakeholders to close the gaps that are raised which can result in negative consequences on their reputation.

Limitations: 1)The reputation measurement models are still lacking consensus in literature. 2)Further future research is needed in order to operationalize these models and move form theory to practice. 3) Further companies in the content analysis might have shown more and different results. 4)This study was not showing the quality of the information disclosed which requires more in depth investigations and research.