Building Stakeholder Management and Culture Essay

Building Stakeholder Management and Culture - Essay Example The paper tells that the value of building a sustainable, goal-oriented corporate culture has been identified as a path towards a thriving venture. Corporate culture talks about practical guiding principle, commonplace values, practices, interests, and beliefs integral to managers. Building a stable stakeholder culture is a key force reinforcing firm stakeholder management. One of the prevalent descriptions of stakeholder culture is that it holds the traditions, beliefs, ideals, and objectives that organisations have built for dealing with stakeholder relationships and concerns. Successful stakeholder management involves the formation of a corporate culture that most largely envisions and considers responsibilities to stakeholders (e.g. individuals, employees, communities, etc). Corporate stakeholders nowadays are confronted with policy and public demands, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and business ethics. Many of such issues are alongside a boost in government ruling and th e enlarged position of subordinate stakeholders in reaction to the economic disorders. Organisations are looking for new code of ethics that will originate from traditional norms as well as from moral codes. Policymakers and government stakeholders have recently acted to implement more accountability and transparency from CEOs to guarantee ethical business conducts and the rights of shareholders. Organisations will discover means to financially support CSR programmes with the assistance of the government, community advocates, and humanitarians. (Polonsky 2005). Ultimately, according to Lamb and Mckee (2005), for the demands of public policy, it is important for numerous stakeholders, especially employees, employers, labour unions, and the government to work in partnership to promote ethical corporate conduct and stakeholder management. Current studies have emphasised the notion of ‘stakeholder culture’ as an influential force when organisations are attempting to evaluat e the value of different stakeholder demands. Although some businesses manage to survive an economic setback, they would be in a better position if they will evaluate their stakeholder culture, rooted in ethical conduct, and characterised as the â€Å"shared beliefs, values, and evolved practices regarding the solution of recurring stakeholder-related problems† (Global Economics Crisis Resource Centre 2009, 34). Recognition of an organisation’s stakeholder culture can contribute to the growth of cooperation among stakeholders. The Stakeholder Theory In the 1970s, extraordinary intensities of environmental crisis and development, such as oil crisis, occurred. Because of this predicament the ‘stakeholder theory’ emerged as an ingenious global perspective of the corporate world (Lorca & Garcia-Diez 2004). Nevertheless, the concept upon which it was grounded was an already widely known field, because the concept ‘stakeholder’ had been applied in t he 1960s. However, some scholars trace back the origin of ‘stakeholder’ way earlier than the 1960s; Preston (1990 as cited in Lorca & Garcia-Diez 2004) claims that the concept surfaced when the General Electric Company classified primary stakeholders during the Great Depression, namely, the general public, customers, employees, and owners. But it was Freeman (1984) who formally established the stakeholder theory. Today, according to Carroll and Buchholtz (2011), the stakeholder theory is recognised far and wide and has gained the official approval of numerous academic disciplines, and professional groups. Nowadays, success no longer relies simply on the customer, but also on the attainment of a stable equilibrium that pleases a company’s stakeholders: employees, owners, customers, suppliers, and