Development of Stakeholder Integration Strategies for Housing Companies

Abstract

Managers of public housing companies are confronted with multiple demands, like e.g. providing affordable housing, improving energy-efficiency of their building stock and distributing profit to the municipality. Strategies to balance these different interests are required for optimizing performance.Integrated Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies build on stakeholder engagement to ensure that economic, social and environmental criteria from different perspectives are included in decision-making. Several studies indicate that stakeholder management improves performance. However, stakeholder integration efforts can be costly and time-consuming. Thus, managers need to know how to integrate stakeholders in an efficient and effective way. The purpose of this research is to develop stakeholder integration strategies for housing companies depending on stakeholder types and context.We use a single case study design and select a German municipal housing company which has a pioneering status in CSR activities. Qualitative and quantitative methods are applied including stakeholder interviews, a stakeholder survey and document analyses. The environment of the housing company is described including stakeholder types, issues, and heterogeneity of demands. By combining the gained insights, we develop hypotheses on stakeholder typologies and on strategies for their suitable integration.Due to the single case design, further empirical testing of the developed hypotheses is needed before our findings can be generalized. Managers of housing companies find ideas on how to integrate specific stakeholder types adequately. By integrating multiple stakeholder perspectives in decision-making, companies might develop more sustainable solutions and increase public value creation.Despite extensive research on stakeholder management, there is still a lack of practical approaches for deciding on stakeholder integration strategies. Our study contributes to further close this gap by developing strategies which rely on structured stakeholder analyses.