دانلود رایگان مقاله مدیریت ذینفعان به عنوان منبع مزیت رقابتی

Today’s firms face threats and opportunities arising from a variety ofstakeholders, including shareholders, bondholders, employees, customers, suppliers, joint-venture partners, regulatory agencies, communities, governments, labor unions, advocacy groups, and the natural environment. Stakeholder management involves implementing organizational policies and practices that take into account the goals and concerns of relevant stakeholders, in a manner that is consistent with the firm’s enterprise-level strategy and profitmaking purpose. A key question in stakeholder management is ‘‘who and what really counts.’’ Well-established prioritization criteria are the stakeholders’ relative amounts of power, legitimacy, and urgency. Yet, despite the view that stakeholder management is important for value creation, managers lack a clear guidance about what an overarching stakeholder management strategy looks like. Consequently, the purpose of this article is to offer a comprehensive picture of stakeholder management that goes beyond the firm’s dyadic relations with particular stakeholders to consider stakeholder portfolios. To do this, we present two typologies capturing the choices top managers use to align stakeholder management with the firm’s strategy, and provide multiple examples of how specific multinationals are achieving this alignment. The concept of strategy-stakeholder management alignment is clearly captured in research on sustainability by Dung Nguyen and Stanley Slater when they state: ‘‘Commitments to the environmental and social bottom lines cannot simply be altruistic endeavors. If that were the case, superior financial performance would never be realized. Consequently, the firm must seek opportunities to apply the principles of environmental and socialresponsibility in such a way that the firm is more effective at satisfying the needs of its customers or more efficient in the way that it conducts its business.’’ Three firms that clearly exemplify this strategystakeholder management alignment are IBM, Unilever, and Federal Express.

CONCLUSION

This article seeks to provide a more holistic and comprehensive view of stakeholder management by delineating different approaches firms can take with regard to their stakeholder relationships and stakeholder portfolios. In doing this, we integrate insights from competitive strategy to stakeholder management, and highlight, in particular, the need to align stakeholder decisions to the learning processes of exploration and exploitation, as well as the strategic positions of cost leadership and differentiation. By incorporating a strategic perspective, we seek to complement the notion of firms needing to react to stakeholder pressures exerted upon them. Instead, we position firms as being actively engaged in using stakeholder management as a way to support and reinforce their overall strategic posture. This cross-fertilization helps us to position stakeholder management as critical, not only because it is ethical or moral, but because it is strategic.