Managerial competences and integrated reporting practices: perception-based evidence from Uganda

Purpose - This study’s purpose is twofold: First, to investigate the relationship between managerial competences and Integrated Reporting (IR) practices; Second, to test whether all the managerial competences attributes are significantly related to IR practices. Design/methodology/approach - This study adopts a correlational research design, and is also cross-sectional. Data were collected using a questionnaire survey of 188 manufacturing firms in Uganda. Data were analyzed with the help of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. Findings - The study finds that significant associations between managerial competences of knowledge and experience exist with IR practices except for skills. However, experience is the most significant predictor of IR practices. This experience is manifest, among others, in the managers’ ability to get the word out to the public including why the public should be proud of what the company does and about what the company offers and works to make it better. Research limitations/implications - This study did not control governance variables and yet governance and IR are inextricably associated. Future research should aim at testing the efficacy of investing in governance aspects potentially improving IR. This is because Environmental, Social and Governance investing is predicted to make capitalism work better and deal with the grave threat posed by climate change. The study also focuses on manufacturing firms, and these results may be only applicable to the manufacturing firms in Uganda. More research is therefore needed to further understand the effect of managerial competence attributes on IR in manufacturing firms in other contexts. Well, the results imply that more experienced managers are better placed to embrace IR practices than their less experienced counterparts. Originality/value - The authors find that managerial experience explains IR practices more than competences and this makes intuitive sense since, for example, better experiential communication potentially minimizes the challenges such as lack of comparability, difficulty in communicating entity-specific information, information not available in a usable format and data errors normally encountered by IR (especially electronic) users. Hence, this study enhances our understanding of the role of managerial competences in the improvement of IR practices using perceptions of report preparers from a developing country where IR is voluntary and where the size of the stock market is small.