Article: Engineering of a proactive stakeholder culture Journal: Journal of Business and Management (JBM) 2025 Vol.30 No.1 pp.26 - 44 Abstract: This study builds on previous scholarly works that argue that stakeholder management is a normative process and that organisations should develop a proactive stakeholder orientation to get the optimal benefit of stakeholder management. We add to the extant literature by conducting an exploratory, inductive, qualitative case study to improve our understanding of how proactive stakeholder organisations engineer and maintain a culture that supports a proactive stakeholder orientation. We argue that proactive stakeholder culture must be studied because it represents unique and specific philosophical underpinnings rather than ethical or socially responsible cultures. The study makes several contributions to the scholarly literature on stakeholder culture. First, the study builds theoretical generalisations of the phenomenon under consideration. Second, it provides the best practices and content for developing proactive stakeholder cultures. Third, it defines and discovers a critical moderator, i.e., confining pressure, between well-established stakeholder cultural values and psychological stages of ethical decision-making. Finally, the study has an inferential contribution that a strong proactive culture may help organisational members successfully go through the stages of moral decision-making, as Rest (1986) enumerated. Inderscience Publishers - linking academia, business and industry through research

Title: Engineering of a proactive stakeholder culture

Authors: Mohammad A. Ali; Stephen J. Jones

Addresses: School of Business Administration, Pennsylvania State University (Harrisburg), 777 West Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA, 17057, USA ' School of Business Administration, Pennsylvania State University (Harrisburg), 777 West Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA, 17057, USA

Abstract: This study builds on previous scholarly works that argue that stakeholder management is a normative process and that organisations should develop a proactive stakeholder orientation to get the optimal benefit of stakeholder management. We add to the extant literature by conducting an exploratory, inductive, qualitative case study to improve our understanding of how proactive stakeholder organisations engineer and maintain a culture that supports a proactive stakeholder orientation. We argue that proactive stakeholder culture must be studied because it represents unique and specific philosophical underpinnings rather than ethical or socially responsible cultures. The study makes several contributions to the scholarly literature on stakeholder culture. First, the study builds theoretical generalisations of the phenomenon under consideration. Second, it provides the best practices and content for developing proactive stakeholder cultures. Third, it defines and discovers a critical moderator, i.e., confining pressure, between well-established stakeholder cultural values and psychological stages of ethical decision-making. Finally, the study has an inferential contribution that a strong proactive culture may help organisational members successfully go through the stages of moral decision-making, as Rest (1986) enumerated.

Keywords: stakeholder management; stakeholder theory; stakeholder culture; descriptive stakeholder theory.

DOI: 10.1504/JBM.2025.146955

Journal of Business and Management, 2025 Vol.30 No.1, pp.26 - 44

Received: 08 Oct 2024
Accepted: 08 Mar 2025
Published online: 27 Jun 2025 *

Title: Engineering of a proactive stakeholder culture

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