The Role of Company Secretary’s Strategic Dimensions in Enhancing Corporate Governance and Financial Reporting Quality: A Review

The evolution of the role of the company secretary has shifted from an administrative role to a governance advisor. Company secretary, as the guardian of governance, is significant to the organisation because it plays a more strategic role in promoting organisational transparency, ensuring regulatory compliance and facilitating efficient decision-making. To investigate whether the company secretary can influence the strategic effectiveness of the board and financial reporting disclosure, this study followed the PRISMA paradigm by reviewing eleven peer-reviewed empirical studies from reputable sources such as ScienceDirect, Emerald, and Scopus. The study discovered that five key strategic dimensions are critical to the effectiveness of the company secretary, namely professional competence, organisational structure, Disclosure and transparency of information, ethical values and responsibilities, and risk, compliance, and cultural. These dimensions demonstrate company secretaries’ growing importance in a variety of organisational contexts and demonstrate the wider strategic value they add to governance procedures. This analysis makes the case that the company secretary should be moved from a supporting role to a key, strategic participant in the boardroom as governance expectations continue to change. The results of this study also lay the groundwork for future studies on how to better integrate the company secretary’s strategic dimensions into governance frameworks so that their contributions are acknowledged, formalised, and in line with the requirements of contemporary corporate supervision.