Bringing the Heat: An Emotions-Based Theory of Stakeholder Management

The dominant paradigms of stakeholder management take a calculative approach to understanding stakeholders’ interests and their effects on joint value creation. In contrast, considerable evidence shows that stakeholder responses to organizational actions are frequently emotional, and thus extant frameworks of stakeholder management may be incomplete. In this paper, we integrate insights from research on emotions with arguments from the extant stakeholder management literature to develop an emotions-based theory of stakeholder management. Specifically, we develop theory that explicates the role of symmetrical and asymmetrical emotional interactions between an organization and its stakeholders. By elucidating how these interactions can lead to either emotional intensification or transition of stakeholder emotions, we show how they affect the potential for both benefit and harm to joint value creation. In doing so, our emotions-based theory gives both managers and stakeholders a better understanding of the d...