We have studied trust in organizations across four major categories of stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers and investors. (Note: We define trust as the psychological willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another individual or organization based on positive expectations regarding the other party’s motivation and/or behavior.) To aid in our analysis, we developed a framework that differentiated across stakeholder groups along two dimensions. The first measures the intensity of a relationship, based on length and frequency of interactions. The second relates to whether a stakeholder is inside or outside the organization.
The two dimensions — intensity and locus — create four archetypes of stakeholders. (See “Categorization of Stakeholders,” p. 48.) It should be noted that actual stakeholder groups will not necessarily be perfectly aligned with any of the four archetypes. For example, a stakeholder’s relationship with an organization can be of “moderate” intensity (instead of “high” or “low”), and some stakeholders will have multiple affiliations (for example, as an employee and a customer). As such, the four quadrants of stakeholders should be viewed more as a general “map” rather than as a table of four clearly demarcated cells. As an example that approximates the model case in reality, each stakeholder group in our study can be associated with one of the archetypes: customers (high-intensity, external), suppliers (low-intensity, external), employees... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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