The Social Nature of Stakeholder Utility
提出一个模型，解释利益相关者如何通过观察企业对其他利益相关者的对待来形成自身效用，包括认可、嫉妒或竞争三种角色，帮助管理者理解利益相关者行为的深层动机。
For better or for worse, one stakeholder’s utility derives in part from their perceptions of how other stakeholders are being treated by the business. Yet, to date, the stakeholder literature has not explained well what stakeholders are actually looking for in a business’s treatment of other stakeholders. We allow for and help explain an emerging view in the literature whereby stakeholders might be looking out for each other’s interests, but we round out that view by also allowing for and explaining a different kind of possibility, whereby stakeholders disapprove of the favorable treatment of others or approve of their unfavorable treatment. Our model details how the other stakeholder serves three different roles with respect to the focal stakeholder’s utility: (a) as a symbolic representation of the values the business prioritizes—especially compared to the focal stakeholder’s own worldview, (b) as a referent for interpersonal equity comparisons, and (c) as either a perceived competitor for or facilitator of resources. We describe these three roles and then show how they interrelate in a process model. In doing so, we provide a more detailed and complete understanding of stakeholder utility than currently exists in the literature. Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved.