A measurement scale for assessing intellectual capital disclosure

Abstract

Orientation: Intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) including structural capital (SC), human capital (HC), and relational capital (RC) of non-financial information creates a shareholder value. Conflicting evidence on this voluntary disclosure suggests the need to develop an ICD measurement scale for reducing information asymmetry in the annual financial reporting.

Research purpose: The main aim of this study was to develop a multi-dimensional measurement scale consisting of groups of items for critically examining the extent of ICD in the corporate annual reports or integrated reports to build investor confidence.

Motivation for the study: The lack of voluntary disclosure on intellectual capital (IC) increases information asymmetry and negatively affects investor decision-making. An ICD measurement scale is expected to facilitate the reliable extraction of non-financial information from the annual reports or integrated reports.

Research approach/design and method: A quantitative cross-sectional study was used with an ICD measurement scale for extracting information from 150 annual reports of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) listed companies. The measurement scale was subjected to exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

Main findings: The ICD measurement scale yielded one factor structures across all three dimensions with internal reliability statistics (Cronbach alphas) of SC (0.849), HC (0.806) and RC (0.749), after the second level factor analysis.

Practical/managerial implications: The ICD measurement scale will enable the market participants to understand how non-financial information can be extracted reliably from the annual reports and use to assess the value of intangible assets.

Contribution/value-add: The novel contribution of the study is the construction of a measurement scale for assessing ICD.