Taking a Moral Stand on the Russian War in Ukraine: Financial Reporting by German Companies and “Morally Authentic CEO Activism.”

In this paper we contribute empirically to the literature on the link between authenticity and CEO activism by testing the said connection. Most literature on organizational authenticity focuses on the effects of authenticity (or the lack thereof) on the acceptance of corporate activism by different stakeholders. What is still missing, in our opinion, is a clear framework of measuring the level of “authenticity.” In this paper we offer a measure of “morally authentic CEO activism” with the help of content analysis of annual reports of a sample of German companies following Russia´s full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. We develop a “moral authenticity” construct based on the relationship between two indicators 1. “semantic intensity score” and “moral intensity score”, and 2. “actionable intensity score.” The relationship between these variables measured by logistic regression and scatterplots captures the alignment of moral values and actions.