دانلود رایگان مقاله گرایش ذینفعان به سمت شرکت های اروپایی

Abstract

Stakeholder theory suggests firms should be sensitive to a broad group of stakeholders and their needs, with balanced trade-offs that are fundamental to achieving sustainable competitive advantage, and ultimately survival. Market orientation (MO) scholars also consistently call for inclusion of a broader group of stakeholders than the widely studied customer and competitor groups to better understand the impact of multiple stakeholders on firm performance. In response, this study expands the traditional domain of MO and defines overall stakeholder orientation as including customers, competitors, employees and shareholders, designating them as ‘core and essential stakeholders.’ Scholars have also advocated the inclusion of more forward-looking, proactive considerations in the conceptual framework to complement the usual responsive aspects of MO. Measures for both proactive and responsive orientations for the four core stakeholder groups, representing overall stakeholder orientation, were developed and validated. Findings show that for European firms proactive considerations are potentially more impactful than responsive, and overall stakeholder orientation is a significant predictor of improved financial and non-financial performance.

5.3. Conclusion

The structural model results confirm proactive and responsive components for customer, competitor, employee, and shareholder orientations that are all related to overall stakeholder orientation. Further, overall stakeholder orientation is positively related to overall firm performance, and the findings indicate a single theoretical stakeholder model is likely relevant for industries in multiple European countries. This research also provides a validated set ofmeasures for proactive and responsive components of core stakeholders, and a basis for further empirical research in varied cultural and industry contexts. Moreover, from an analytical point of view the scales represent at least an initial basis for practical implementation. Consistent with Hult (2011), this study supports a market orientation plus other core stakeholders and further reinforces the long-standing calls to integrate stakeholder theory and market orientation. Further work remains in investigating stakeholders such as suppliers and communities to the core group studied here. Such studies may provide insights and better explanatory relationships among stakeholders and firm performance, or other corporate dimensions such as ethics and corporate social responsibility (Freeman et al., 2010).