ABSTRACT This study presents an investigation of the legitimacy‐driven external and internal determinants that influence oil and gas companies to emphasize and manipulate nonfinancial (NF) disclosures through tone management. We select 654 stand‐alone NF reports from 74 oil and gas companies between 2008 and 2021, adopting quantitative approaches based on the calculation of tone, descriptive statistics, inference tests and regression analysis. Our findings show that financial crises, updated NF reporting frameworks, national culture and corporate characteristics influenced the tone adopted in NF disclosures. The study contributes to impression management (IM) literature, identifying contexts in which language was used as greenwashing behavior or to genuinely manage legitimacy. Our findings assist investors in recognizing how self‐serving biases in tone can compromise the transparency of NF reporting, enabling informed decisions, and providing insights for regulators in developing standards to neutralize tone and mitigate unethical business strategies so that companies disclose balanced information.
Pombinho et al. (Mon,) studied this question.