Stakeholders According to Business Leaders free essay sample

The spirit of corporate citizenship suggests that a company that derives profit from the community has an obligation to contribute to its development. I t is reasonable to expect the principle of mutual obligation to apply to the business sector. John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, 1998. (FN1). Debate has emerged regarding a shift of focus in the organizations relationships with its various stakeholder groups. In the past the company has been seen predominantly as an instrument of its owners. However, they point out that stakeholder theory does not necessarily presume that managers act as the rightful locus of corporate control and governance. Managers are often cast in the role of referees in the balance game between various stakeholders. This, however, does not take into account that managers are also employees and often investors. Therefore managers are themselves stakeholders, indeed a privileged class of stakeholder in the enterprise. (FN21) This suggests that managers may be motivated to practice opportunistic behavior. We will write a custom essay sample on Stakeholders According to Business Leaders or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Further, it leads to the argument that the subjective attitudes and motivations of managers may be a significant feature in organization-stakeholder relationships. Many authors claim that there is a lack of empirical research in the stakeholder area. (FN22) Marens, Wicks, and Huber suggest that looking more closely at specific stakeholder relationships would create a richer definition of a stakeholder managerial approach and help explain, even predict, the impact of this approach on performance. Several studies which examine stakeholder relations can, in fact, be found. FN23) Predominantly these studies investigate the link between stakeholder relationships and company performance. (FN24) It would appear that little attention has been given to the qualitative nature of specific stakeholder relationships. The present study examines the relationship between organizations and stakeholder groups as reported by the companys leaders. These groups include owners, employees, customers, supp liers, the environment, and community. The data that are presented and discussed in this paper focus on the community-stakeholder relationship. Open-ended questions were deliberately used in a semi-structured interview to allow the interviewee to define the various stakeholder groups themselves. The stakeholder group identified as community is particularly open to individual definition by business leaders due to the ambiguity which commonly surrounds the term. Community is an amorphous concept that the interviewers did not attempt to clarify. Under these conditions, therefore, community as a stakeholder entity is whatever the interviewee perceives it to be. The relationship described is a two-way relationship but it is defined from only one perspective. By allowing the interviewees to describe what they meant by community, and not imposing any external attributes in the term, we have minimized the impact of stakeholder-related attributes. METHODA study was undertaken to ascertain how Australian business leaders perceive their relationships with the wider community. A secondary aim of the research is to investigate the integration of social and environmental values in daily business activities. Twelve chief executive officers (CEOs) or managing directors from a range of companies were interviewed. These companies vary in terms of industry, organization size, ownership, organizational age, and structure (see Table 1). The CEOs were selected on the basis of accessibility and availability. A semi-structured interview schedule was used which incorporates 16 questions covering five areas of inquiry. The questions are open-ended and followed by neutral prompts. This schedule was used as an interview guide during an interview lasting between one and one and a half hours which was held at the CEOs offices. The interviews are analyzed using the editing approach to qualitative data. FN25) Editing analysis means that the researcher enters the text like an editor searching for meaningful segments: cutting, pasting, and rearranging until the reduced summary reveals the interpretive truth. The editing techniques have a cyclical quality: interpretations emerge from the analysis of a particular theme or category and then are repeatedly compared with the original textual data. This is called c onstant comparison, where eventually additional analysis no longer contributes in discovering anything new about a category.