1 - Maurício Mendonca Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade da Universidade de São Paulo - FEA - FEA
2 - Ronaldo de Oliveira Santos Jhunior Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade da Universidade de São Paulo - FEA - Administração
3 - Mariana Torres Uchôa Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade da Universidade de São Paulo - FEA - Departamento de Administração
Reumo
As a key attribute, stakeholder management requires simultaneous attention to the legitimate interests of all stakeholders. For this, it is important to understand what the interests of the stakeholders are and how these interests affect the viability of the business. Usually, stakeholders make different claims about the organization's resources. Whether capital, profits, effort, or time, stakeholders may disagree about how or where each of these resources should be used. As a result of this conflict, balancing stakeholder interests is of fundamental importance for management.
Much of the literature on stakeholder theory has as its central premise that the good treatment and management of stakeholder interests contributes to the value creation over time, which reflects in good business performance. To discover the interest of stakeholders, it is necessary to understand their value drivers, which are related to their power and importance to the company. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the association between the power and strategic importance of stakeholders and the distribution of value to them by the company.
To understand the optimal point of value distribution for a stakeholder, Harrison and Bosse (2013) determined two factors: power and strategic importance. When a stakeholder has high power, that is, a high capacity to harm the company, and high strategic importance, great value is distributed to it, because the value to be created by this type of stakeholder is able to mitigate a higher cost of value allocation (Harrison & Bosse, 2013).
The sample under study is composed of prospectuses of public companies that went public through the Initial Public Offering (IPO) at Toronto Stock Exchange. For the analysis of the data collected in the 104 prospectuses, the content analysis technique was used. After data collection and treatment, scores were obtained regarding the stakeholder strategies proposed by the companies, which were used to measure the prioritization of stakeholders. And the regression of ordinary least squares was used to test the hypotheses of this research.
The results observed reveal that not only is Power and Strategic Importance relevant in the distribution of value to Stakeholders but also that, in the decision-making process of organizations, Stakeholder Strategic Importance has greater influence when compared to its Power. In other words, the results support the hypothesis that decision-makers in companies consider more strategic importance than power when they distribute value to their stakeholders.
The empirical evidence found in this study shows that in publicly traded companies at TSX, Strategic Importance has a greater influence than Power in the decision to distribute value to its main stakeholder groups.
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Harrison, J. S., & Bosse, D. A. (2013). How much is too much? The limits to generous treatment of stakeholders. Business horizons, 56(3).
Harrison, J. S., & Wicks, A. C. (2013). Stakeholder theory, value, and firm performance. Business ethics quarterly, 97-124