The Importance of Stakeholders for Corporate Reputation

Abstract

Many scientists analysed the importance of stakeholders on the ground of the interrelationship between an organization and stakeholders. Nevertheless, scientists do not define which stakeholders should be considered as the most or the least important. For this reason, the stakeholder grouping in accordance with their importance to the organization has been done. Stakeholders are divided into internal and external; primary and secondary; normative, functional, diffused and customers; regulatory, organizational, community and media; groups in the order of power and interest. In this paper, we also highlighted another stakeholder group, which we call a shadow group due to its illegal impact on the organization or industry. The analysis of stakeholder grouping initiated that while grouping stakeholders in accordance with their importance to the organization, it is worth to divide them into primary and secondary. Allocating the stakeholders to the primary and secondary groups unconsciously leads to the conclusion that primary stakeholders take the first, i.e. the most important place with regard to secondary stakeholders. It was observed that the scientists, acting on business interests, propose that even these stakeholders who find themselves in the same stakeholder group have unequal importance - the organizations give the priority to stakeholders, previously considered as the secondary. Consequently, because of these two different mainstream approaches of the theorists and the scientists, acting on business interests, it remains unclear what stakeholders should be attributed to which groups considering their importance to organization.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.26.1.6921