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, with this paper 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 the relevant decision makers are not necessarily found within the classic boundaries of the firm. Consequently, we argue that decision makers are simultaneously stakeholders with attributes that might be relevant to the other decision makers involved in prioritization. Our framework captures this complexity and identifies an important source of heterogeneity among decision makers. As well, we identify a more extensive set of stakeholder attributes that includes powerlessness and illegitimacy.