Research | Funded Projects

ENHANCING STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT THROUGH STRATEGIC CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

Recently, systematic corporate governance and strategic communication have become fundamental issues in the agenda of managers, scholars and communication practitioners (Goodman, 2006; Invernizzi and Romenti, 2009). Several questions arise: which are the roots of this issue? And, how prominent and strategic has the role of communication become in the governance of complex organizations?In both management and corporate communication fields, scholars seem to be focussed on how to manage mutually beneficial relationships inside and outside the company (van Riel, 1995; Grunig et al., 2002). This concept highlights the fact that the company is a social institution that generates value, in economic and social terms. Hence, executives have to develop a management culture that focuses on a vocation of service to different stakeholders. This means that companies need to choose how to answer to stakeholders’ expectations and requirements in order to gain competitive advantage (Van Riel and Fombrun, 2007; Hall, 1993).Thus, decisions on creating and using communication resources play a fundamental role in the formulation and implementation of CC strategy and definition of stakeholders mapping. As pointed out in the literature on corporate communication, resources are an important factor in setting an effective communication strategy and the achievement of communication objectives (Argenti 2007). Communication resources and decisions required to engage with various stakeholders, are worthy of closer examination. According to Kitchen and Schultz (2001): “Arrogant managers who do not value relationships and stakeholders’ interests (or even stakeholders themselves), and do not value leadership and other change-oriented practices will find it more difficult to keep their license to operate”Yet, in earlier stages of market development, many organizations focused upon consumers, customers or end-users or on shareholders in their financial markets, often ignoring the values or misperceptions that may occur in terms of unmanaged communications. Organizations have to focus on all stakeholders that can include shareholders, employees, owners, business and alliance partners, communities and a number of other, internally and externally involved participants. Thus, it is important to see how organisations deal with the new demands from society and especially if they change their policies in order to gain trust and reputation in the long run for being sustainable, transparent and trustworthy, creating synergistic value from stakeholder engagement (Morsing and Schultz, 2006; Carroll and Shabana, 2010). Starting from these considerations, this project intends to provide a theoretical analysis of strategic communication by identifying several pitfalls that can lead to ineffective engagement of stakeholders.Hence, the contribution corporate communication offers to stakeholders engagement will be analysed, exploring how it is put into practice by selected companies through an approach based on stakeholder involvement strategies. This exploration could give indications on the future development of strategic communication, illustrating how to build a possible virtuous circle integrating such activities in the overall business strategy.