Social Indicators of ESG and Firm’s Financial Performance in India

Abstract

The paper traces the evolution of sustainability and discusses sustainable HRM from the ESG perspective and its impact on business in select Indian listed companies using the extant literature. An operational definition of sustainable HRM has been drawn to identify actors in this field and outline their contribution to the Social factor in the recently evolved and mandated ESG framework in India. The paper is a quantitative study to explore the relationship between the select Indian firms’ performance on select social indicators—overall Social disclosure score, gender diversity, attrition, training hours per employee and HR policies—and their overall financial performance—EBIT—using the panel data regression model. A period of 5 years from 2017 to 2021 has been chosen for the analysis.