Lakhasly

Non-financial information disclosure belongs to another aspect of corporate information disclosure field. Researches has found that impression management methodology is applied in the non-financial information dis-closure.

Actually, some studies have investigated the effective of impression management in the non-financial information reports. Studies focus on the influence of impression on the stock price. Further, some experimental methods are used to investigate the effect of impression management on the investors’ prediction and desiccation making. Staw et al., examine the reasons given by CEOs to explain their firms’ performance in annual stockholder reports and find out that the higher self-severing attribution tendency in the CEO’s report, the stock price for the company will change positively. This result has no difference in stable firms as well as the unstable firms [9] .
Cesario et al., suggest when a message recipient “feels right” from regulatory fit, this subjective experience transfers to the persuasion context and serve as information for relevant evaluations, including perceived message persuasiveness and options of the topic. That is to say, the better message recipients feel, the more they will agree on the message. Firms disclose more quantitative information in their CSR reports may bring two kinds of impression to readers; one kind is that firms attach importance to social responsibility practice that takes more inputs, and firms spend more time searching statistic data used to launch CSR reports, not just meeting the demands of regulators or stakeholders. The other kind is that firms are more sincere and do not confuse information by disclosing more qualitative description [47]

Rämö suggested pictures can enhance the comprehension of reports, especially CSR reports. When pictures and printed words are presented together, it is the picture which readily elicits the first response, because pictures impact the viewer directly without the need for translation within mind. Furthermore, Rämö also thinks reports with incongruent visuals are likely to be distracting and the readers will be able to recall fewer points from the message. Based on above opinions, pictures not only can convey information, but also can make readers focus on some certain information [48] . Breitbarth and Harris argued that visual communication is as important as words and numbers in companies’ non-financial performance to carry information [49] . Cho et al., investigates the language of US corporate environmental disclosure and suggests that there are self-serving biases present in the language and verbal tone used in corporations’ environmental disclosures. They use language and verbal tone for managing take holder impressions [10] .

From now on we can see that there has been lots of researches about impression management done related to the non-financial information disclosure. Due to the characteristic of non-financial information, scholars find the influence of impression management on the stakeholders. They also find the way how they using impression management in non-financial information disclosure. By reviewing these studies, we can know that when company perform good, they prefer using more quantitative information to gain a good evaluation from the readers. Besides, graphs is another method used by companies to making impression management in their information disclosure.