Negotiating the Organizational Effectiveness of Social Ventures among Multiple Stakeholders

Abstract

When planning their social ventures, entrepreneurs generally need to consider multiple stakeholders with conflicting views of organizational effectiveness. We propose a scoring technique that is often used for the analysis of multiple-issue negotiations to analyze and manage the stakeholder conflicts. We show how the quantitative assessment of stakeholders’ preferences results in a one-dimensional subjective measure of organizational effectiveness for each stakeholder. Our approach complements recent research by contributing to a quantitative discussion of organizational effectiveness. Due to typical structural features of the employed scoring template, we are able to derive general principles concerning the conflict structure and the interaction of multiple stakeholders. We find that an increase in the number of stakeholders required for an agreement tends to decrease the perceived organizational effectiveness for the initial negotiators. On the other hand, the multitude of possible agreements is also reduced, thereby sharpening the focus on acceptable proposals to the stakeholders involved.