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.
Subscribe today to read this article, or Buy a PDF.
More Info.
Buy this article. Purchase one or more copies of this article as a PDF.
Subscribe today to read the most recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
Already registered or subscribed? Login below.
Current Subscribers: Do you subscribe to MIT Sloan Management Review? Register for online access.
- Register for free access to recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Subscribe and read articles from the past three years online.
- Premium subscription—access to the entire archive of articles.