Understanding Motivation and Social Influence in Stakeholder Prioritization

Abstract

Insight into organizational responses to stakeholder claims and influence attempts is critical to understand the challenges currently facing managers and organizations. Drawing on Kelman's (1958) model of social influence, we advance the field's understanding of the factors driving firm-level prioritization of competing stakeholder claims by developing a theoretical framework that accounts for both the stakeholder attributes that are important to relevant decision makers, and the decision makers' motivations for accepting or rejecting the influence attempts of varying stakeholders. Our framework distinguishes itself from existing research by focusing on stakeholder prioritization, not salience, recognizing that stakeholder-related decisions result from group interaction and that important decision makers are not limited to those found within the classic boundaries of the firm. Consequently, we argue that decision makers are simultaneously stakeholders with attributes that might be relevant to other decision makers involved in prioritization. In addition, we identify a more extensive set of stakeholder attributes that includes powerlessness and illegitimacy.

Activism and Abdication on the Inside: The Effect of Everyday Practice on Corporate Responsibility

“…In our study, we find informants who position themselves at the polar ends of these two orientationsabdicators (conscious, unconscious) and permanent activists, as well as those who shift between the two practice-orientationshybrid activists. The hybrid activists in particular display the dynamic shifts in and out of moral decision making predicted by Weitzner and Deutsch (2015), while abdicators and activists displayed entrenched positions with little or no cross-over.…”

“…This prevalent view presents a significant barrier to fully understanding the potential forces of change within business organisations (Weitzner and Deutsch 2015). Taking the firm as the unit of analysis obscures the importance of heterogeneous individual actors in driving change both at a company and societal level.…”

“…used by social change agents to transform the organization (e.g. Acquier, Daudigeos, and Valiorgue 2011;Alt and Craig 2016;Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012;Weitzner and Deutsch 2015).…”

“…Second, extant research on social intrapreneur identities and strategic activism tends to focus on salient actors in the organization, such as champions and vocal managers who aspire to be change agents and actors in positions of influence (e.g., upper management, designated sustainability personnel, etc.) (see e.g., Andersson and Bateman, 1997;Howard-Grenville 2007;Weitzner and Deutsch 2015). In our study, we focus on managers across multiple hierarchical levels of organisationslower, mid and senior/CEO levels, to offer a more comprehensive picture about who might engage in internal activism and what such social intrapreneurship might look like at the everyday level of practice.…”

CSR Dynamics in the Midst of Competing Injunctions: The case of Danone

“…The two causal mechanisms of internal and external injunctions are both important individually in explaining CSR activities but their interplay might be even more important. In line with this idea, recent stakeholder theory has argued that a firm's identity orientation and managerial motivation affect how the firm prioritizes and responds to stakeholder claims (Bundy et al, ; Weitzner and Deutsch, ). Although our framework suggests that collectivistic firms are more likely to consider the interests of nonfinancial stakeholders and to engage in institutional CSR activities, we believe that neither the firm's identity orientation nor the attributes of stakeholders are entirely predictive of a firm's CSR.…”