UNCONVERING STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT: A DELPHI APPROACH TO UNRAVEL COMPLEXITY

Although stakeholder engagement (SE) is presently considered a priority in the management scholars’ research agenda across all domains, there is still no shared theory nor practice on the concept since it lacks clarity and consistency both at conceptual and managerial level. Our study is aimed at depicting and at the same time disentangling the complexity of the SE concept, by outlining its distinctive characteristics and the way they interplay in framing SE. This study is exploratory and it is designed according to an interpretive qualitative methodology. It relies on 14 in-depth interviews which involved a purposive sample of corporate executives, senior consultants and academic scholars selected on the basis of their established expertise in stakeholder relationship management practices. Our evidence points at SE as a dynamic, recurring and self-propelling dialogic process, started and managed by the firm. This process is marked by a progressive opening of the company toward stakeholders which relies on sharing and negotiating a stake that company and stakeholders put forth for confrontation and adjustment. Dialogue appears as the fuel encouraging and moving on this process by allowing parenthetic interaction, reciprocal understanding, and anticipation of stakeholder expectations. Furthermore, SE emerges as a process difficult to tackle with due to its complexity and ambivalence characterized by inner contrasting tensions.