La importancia de las comunidades

After the stakeholder view has been introduced, it is essential to argue why this approach is so important and therefore discuss its main benefit, the mutual value creation.

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Essentially, it can be said that stakeholders and the proactive management of stakeholder relations can contribute to the value creation of a focal organisation in all three areas. The first area is the development of unique resources for the organisation;

the second is the positioning in the market and the third one is to perceive the licence to operate in the socio-political environment (Perrin, 2010). Traditionally, the value creation is seen from two other dimensions, the Resource-Based View and the Industry Structure View. The Stakeholder View forms the third dimension. In a nutshell, the Resource-Based View understands the focal organisation as acting alone, while the Industry Structure View understands one firm as gaining benefits at the expenses of others. This clearly demonstrates the differences to the Stakeholder View (Post et al., 2002).

Table 1: Comparing three views of the sources of organisational wealth⁶

The stakeholder view is not something in addition to the resource-based view and the industry structure view. It combines those two views and enriches them with the socio-political view. These three views combine to create the stakeholder view. Table 1 shows

6 Post et al., 2002, p. 54.

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a comparison of these three views and presents stakeholders who are classically considered within these views. To create mutual value, all levels of stakeholders need to be taken into consideration (Post et al., 2002). Post, Preston and Sachs refer here to value creation as organisational wealth.

Figure 1: The stakeholder view of the corporation⁷

It has to be understood that all different kinds of stakeholders ranging from small suppliers to governmental authorities can contribute positively to the organisation’s value creation. However, arguing only from the perspective of the focal organisation falls short for the stakeholder view. The focus is clearly put on the creation of mutual values and therefore mutual benefits. This means that benefits can be created that do not only serve the needs or have positive effects on one stakeholder in the network, but for the network as a whole. It is about creating value with stakeholders and for stakeholders (Sachs et al., 2009a).

Unique resources

First of all, the relevant stakeholders for the contribution of resources need to be identified. Traditionally from the economic perspective, resources are then exchanged for payment. In the stakeholder paradigm, those contracts (resource for payment) are not seen as completely determined. That means that incomplete or even implicit contracts do exist (Sachs & Rühli, 2011). According to Moran and Ghoshal, three conditions

7 Post et al., 2002, p. 55.

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must be fulfilled for the exchange of resources. There must exist an opportunity, the involved parties must expect this exchange to create value and the involved parties must be motivated for knowledge exchange and combination (Moran & Ghoshal, 1996).

Sachs and Rühli point out that the motivation for knowledge exchange and combination is of greater importance in understanding the stakeholder paradigm as it recognises organisations and their stakeholders as owners of resources. Stakeholders can often be motivated to contribute in different ways and above the norm (Sachs & Rühli, 2011).

For example, named employees who spend free time and money to attend training in order to develop their skills can use those newly learned skills towards an increase in resource contribution within their organisation.⁸ Generally in many of those cases, the anonymous market mechanisms are simply replaced by interactions with stakeholders that are highly differentiated. For these stakeholders, contribution above the norm is not motivated through monetary compensation. Rather, the motivating factors here are trust, loyalty, sense of obligation, human commitment, and enthusiasm for a certain technology and so on (Sachs & Rühli, 2011). In today’s times, organisations have to be clear about the conditions under which the resource owners (the stakeholders) are motivated to contribute their resources. Sachs and Rühli bring awareness to this point by stating that “…the goal is to be able to create core competencies that will in return create value through innovative solutions for the stakeholder and the firm” (2011, p.

125).

The licence to compete is introduced when talking about the value creation in connection with the positioning of an organisation in the market. In the stakeholder view, the traditional views of strategic theory on a positioning in the market do differ.

Here, the focus is either on the position of the focal organisation in their stakeholder network or between the stakeholder networks. Of course the competitive environment of our economy cannot be ignored. A focal organisation may be positioned facing stakeholders who are part of a competing stakeholder network. An example would be the situation of two pharmaceutical companies who may have relationships with the same medical doctors. Here it would be interesting for the focal organisation to motivate this medical doctor to contribute to medical studies and therefore to product developments. In this case, the goal is to raise motivation for mutual value creation to

8 For further examples see Sachs and Rühli, 2011, pp. 123–124.

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achieve a higher quality of life within that society and not to simply fight against a competitor to reap rent (Sachs & Rühli, 2011). Some authors even go a step further and state that the focal organisation’s competitive advantage fundamentally depends on its ability to manage their stakeholder relations well (Verbeke & Tung, 2011).

When broaching the issue of mutual value creation with and for social and political stakeholders, it is important to analyse how the interaction between the focal organisation and the social and political stakeholders take place. One of the key issues in regards to this is how the social and political stakeholders can have a voice in the interaction with the focal organisation (Sachs & Rühli, 2011). The mobilisation of groups is a precondition that enables stakeholder interactions to take place (Friedman &

Miles, 2009). Often, those social and political groups have divergent opinions on the issue about what can cause major difficulties for the mutual value creation when interacting with the focal organisation. Here, Sachs and Rühli present their observations from a qualitative study where a Swiss pharmaceutical company and a patient organisation have conducted a multi-stakeholder dialogue on the issue of health literacy.

All sides have seen the importance of that issue and can see that developing solutions for it may improve the quality of life of many people and therefore create mutual value for society (Sachs & Rühli, 2011).

As this chapter has demonstrated, the dimensions and perspectives for mutual value creation can be very diverse. However, this chapter has also demonstrated the huge potential that adopting the stakeholder view may provide for organisations.

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