*2.6. Association between Combating the Bribery Aspect of Corporate Sustainability and Organisational Financial and Non-Financial Performance*

The existing literature on corporate sustainability examines the association between corporate sustainability and the organisation's financial performance, and finds the positive association between them in terms of return on equity (ROE), Tobin's Q, the return on assets (ROA), market share, gross profit margin, firm value, and stock returns [7,12,17,19,20,38,44,45]. For instance, Bhuiyan et al., 2020 [12], found that corporate sustainability practices, with respect to minimising illegal business activities, are positively associated with organisations' financial performance. Furthermore, a review of the literature highlights a positive association between corporate sustainability practices and an organisation's non-financial performance in terms of corporate reputation, innovation and differentiation [46,47], customer satisfaction [48], and employee commitment [49]. For instance, Bhuiyan et al., 2020 [12], found that corporate sustainability practices relating to the minimising illegal business activities are positively associated with the non-financial performance, such as product quality and customer retention rate. Accordingly, it is expected that combating bribery-related corporate sustainability practices might result in both higher financial and non-financial performance. Therefore, we hypothesize that:

**H3:** *Combating the bribery aspect of corporate sustainability has a significant association with organisational financial performance.*

**H4:** *Combating the bribery aspect of corporate sustainability has a significant association with organisational non-financial performance.*

A conceptual model of the study, along with the hypotheses developed above, has been demonstrated in Figure 1 below.

**Figure 1.** Conceptual model of the study variables.
