Being Good and Doing Well: A Stakeholder Culture Approach to Competitive Advantage

We propose that a firm’s stakeholder culture, a newly introduced construct grounded in  ethical theory, can be theoretically linked to sources of competitive advantage through the intervening variables of relationship type - i.e., arm’s length or morally embedded - and relational activity - i.e., bargaining, coordination, learning, and identification. We conclude that firms with moralist stakeholder cultures can achieve competitive advantage through the relational activities of coordination, learning, and identification, while firms with corporate egoist cultures can achieve competitive advantage through hard bargaining. Instrumentalist cultures do not dominate other cultures in any area of relational activity. Implications for theory and research are discussed.

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Dicea Jansen

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