THE TONE OF ANNUAL REPORTS AS A STRATEGIC PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT TOOL: APPLICATION ON TURKEY’S BORSA ISTANBUL CORPORATE GOVERNANCE INDEX FIRMS

Abstract

The annual reports have been identified as one of the key corporate governance practice. If these reports are genuinely being prepared in an attempt to improve the clarity of communication with stakeholders, and give related and necessary information accurately to them, then they become one of the strategic tools affecting performance positively. Therefore, in this study, we aimed a semantic examination of the English versions of annual reports from companies quoted on Borsa Istanbul included in the Corporate Governance Index to see whether the annual reports' tone has an impact on company performance. With this aim, the contents of 2014 annual reports are analyzed by the text-analysis software package Diction 7 and scores for accomplishment, cooperation, activity and optimism are obtained. Efficiency scores are calculated by Data Envelopment Analysis to evaluate to what extent annual reports’ tone and corporate governance ratings impact on company performance. The results show that the annual reports' tone and corporate governance ratings have a significant positive impact on efficiency scores, so on performances of companies.

Keywords

• Corporate governance,DEA efficiency,annual reports,content analysis

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