To understand the meaning of satisfaction, information, monitoring and management in connection to stakeholder
management the Ladder of citizen participation of Arnstein (look at the picture) should be taken into consideration.
Stakeholders can be “kept” on different
involvement levels. Each level has a set
of predefined actions and access rules.
Each level can also be appropriate or inappropriate in regard to different
branches and companies.
The lowest levels of stakeholder involvement (or citizen participation) are
commonly known as manipulation. They
are becoming less acceptable with time
and one could expect that applying such
a stakeholder involvement strategy can
fail the company as a whole.
The reason is that when manipulating
stakeholders a company risks on many
levels. First and foremost with entering
the digital era no dat a is out of reach.
Companies have difficulties hiding their
sins and practice has shown that admitting a sin instead has much better results
on corporate image.
Furthermore, manipulating stakeholders
results in low trust levels. The reason is
that stakeholders expect transparency
and openness. Even if no wrongdoing
has been found, stakeholders are likely
to not trust a company which is accountable to anyone.
The second stage of stakeholder involvement is known as informing or tokenism. A company implementing one of
the three levels of an informing strategy
regards stakeholders as “listeners”.
Stakeholders are informed about the
company’s intentions and policies but
communication is one-sided. Thus,
stakeholders do not have a say about
policies and strategies.
At the higher levels of tokenism some
companies actually implemented the so
called consultation or placation. Thus,
stakeholders were made to believe that
they were involved in decision making.
It must however be clear that none of the
3 stakeholder policies that fall under information or tokenism count as stakeholder involvement. The reason is that
consulting stakeholders in such cases is
in connection to matters of low organizational importance (the color of the
package of a product for example) and is
easily dismissed if contradicting managerial decision making.
Such stakeholder strategies were very
popular and appropriate in the 20th century as stakeholders were not as powerful as they are nowadays.
Today, both the free access to information and the possibility for stakeholderto-stakeholder communication has allowed for higher levels of stakeholder
power.
As was discussed on the previous pages,
mapping stakeholders should catch such
changes in stakeholder status and result
in changes of stakeholder management
tactics.
It is however important to point out that
in this case it is not about a single stakeholder group changing status but rather
about external factors making the rethinking of general corporate stakeholder policies a necessity.
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