Johanna Kujala

The ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness.Design/methodology/approach – A quantitative empirical analysis was conducted on the basis of a survey of 147 respondents within the public sector in Finland. A multivariate linear regression analysis was done to examine how the ethical culture of organisations is related to organisational innovativeness.Findings – A positive link was found in the ethical culture of an organisation and organisational innovativeness: ethical culture was important to behavioural, strategic and process innovativeness. Within the ethical culture of an organisation, the dimension of the congruency of management in particular had an important role in organisational innovativeness.Research limitations/implications – The data were collected from the public sector, and therefore, future studies from the private sector organisations are needed. The results lend support to previous researc...

Corporate Responsibility in Communication: Empirical Analysis of Press Releases in a Conflict

The paper examines how the tensions of corporate responsibility are articulated and reconciled in a controversial situation of a foreign investment. We conducted a conventionalist analysis on the company press releases in a case where a Finnish forest industry company invested in a pulp mill in South America. The findings show that the use of language in press releases mobilizes certain stakeholders while reassuring others, and that the argumentation used creates value-neutral communication, making it possible to pursue strategic goals despite competing values. For teaching, we provide insights on how to communicate in a conflict situation.

Appreciative Intelligence® in leadership culture transformation: a case study

An internationally operating tyre manufacturer faced a challenge of a critically negative atmosphere caused by an abrupt insecurity in the market and recent layoffs. The Human Resources and Development Department called in a local university research team, and an organisation development (OD) intervention based on Appreciative Intelligence® and appreciative inquiry was set up to foster leadership culture that would support the international growth of the company. In the process, middle management was interviewed and the top management was engaged in discussing the current and future leadership culture. Middle management defined core values upon which various steps were to be taken to put the goals of future leadership culture in practice. The study shows how a difficult situation can be transferred into an appreciative positive future oriented action.

Framing Dynamically Changing Firm–Stakeholder Relationships in an International Dispute Over a Foreign Investment: A Discursive Analysis Approach

Stakeholder literature tends to presume that effective stakeholder dialogue, occurring directly or indirectly, among a focal firm, local communities, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is desirable for successful firm–stakeholder relationships. Even if theoretically desirable, effective dialogue does not always occur. There are two key theory-informing lessons in Botnia’s Fray Bentos successful green field pulp mill investment and start-up in Western Uruguay. First, critics could not halt the project politically supported by Uruguay in an expanding multi-party international dispute. Second, the Botnia corporate communications process did not succeed in building consensus relationships, and attention was not paid to discourse creating shared meanings among all stakeholders. Participatory relationships were few, and successful dialogue was at best limited to supporters. This article uses discursive analysis to examine how newspaper and press release texts and language used therein both shaped and reflected the dynamically changing nature of firm–stakeholder relations in the Fray Bentos dispute. Despite the focal firm’s professed good intentions to create participatory relationships with its stakeholders during the building project, various stakeholders opposed the project and Botnia was caught in the crossfire of heated debate between Uruguay and Argentina. Three different frames changing over time are identified: (a) the investment frame, (b) the conflict frame, and (c) the political frame. The analysis shows that the relationships between the focal firm and stakeholders involved many meanings only partly shared, due in part to a lack of corporate appreciation for the role of language in managing firm–stakeholder relationships.

Researching the gap between strategic and operational levels of corporate responsibility

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand differences between the strategic level and the operational level of corporate responsibility within an organization.Design/methodology/approach – The research was conducted as a single case study of one of the more noteworthy Finnish firms with respect to corporate responsibility reporting.Findings – The results show that strategic and operational levels differ in terms of their developmental stage of corporate responsibility. The strategic level is more focused on responsibility issues concerning external stakeholders, on reporting, on corporate image and on quantitative measures. The operational level emphasizes internal stakeholders, acting, daily existence, and qualitative criteria.Research limitations/implications – A well‐known corporate responsibility model was useful for identifying how perspectives concerning corporate social responsibility vary within the corporation. However, to explore the reasons for this variation, the actors, actions, ou...

Managing stakeholder dialogue: the case of Botnia in Uruguay

Stakeholder dialogue is an effective way for a company to enhance its sensitivity to the operational environment and to increase stakeholders’ understandings of the dilemmas facing the company. An open and transparent dialogue process can create fertile ground for solving tensions in stakeholder relations. However, the process is not always straightforward. This article presents a case where a Finnish forest industry company’s decision to build a pulp mill in Uruguay raised both opposing and supporting views among the local interest groups. The company faced the challenge of how to engage with the hostile, opposing groups in order to ensure their operations in Uruguay. By engaging in this case, students will deepen their understanding of the multitude of stakeholder interests and learn to facilitate a dialogue that seeks to find solutions and avoid conflict in a situation of a stakeholder dispute.

Company stakeholder responsibility : an empirical investigation of top managers’ attitudinal change

Purpose Company stakeholder responsibility considers stakeholder engagement and management as key to long-term firm success. The purpose of this paper is to examine how top managers’ stakeholder responsibility attitudes change and how they balance stakeholder responsibilities and economic interests. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted empirical research using the company stakeholder responsibility framework by conducting a repeated cross-sectional survey in Finland in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. Findings The study shows how development in the business context influences managers’ attitudes towards stakeholder responsibility. Simultaneously with the expansion of free competition in 1990s Finland, managerial commitment to company stakeholder responsibility strengthened in Finnish industry. Research limitations/implications The target group consisting of industrial managers both in a single-country context and the social desirability bias present in survey research may limit the generalisability of the results. Originality/value The study contributes to the discussion of the role of situational factors in the development of corporate responsibility by showing that while economic changes have some influence on managerial attitudes, the expansion of free markets, together with increased regulation in certain areas, appears to influence managers’ stakeholder responsibility attitudes to an even greater degree.

A Pragmatist Perspective on Management Scholarship and on Stakeholder Engagement in Particular

This chapter outlines key ideas of pragmatism and calls for management and organizational scholarship to look at business, which is rather practical in nature, from a pragmatist perspective. What this means is that research should be initiated, in the first place, with an intention to solve an important real-life problem, should be aimed to have some practical consequences for the reality, and these consequences should be intended to make people’s living better. In this chapter, we also look at the historical development of research in business schools and show how it moved away from key pragmatist ideas toward positivism and, as a result, lost its relevance to practicing managers. We argue that management research not only should, but also can be conducted from a pragmatist perspective. We highlight stakeholder theory as a relevant example of such research. We argue that by examining different aspects of stakeholder engagement based on actual business cases, the case studies covered in this book can potentially offer rich practical materials for management scholars to support their theoretical contributions.

Value Co-creation in Stakeholder Relationships: A Case Study

The purpose of this article is to deepen our understanding of co-creation of value in stakeholder relationships. The authors present a case study on the process of strategic transformation in a medium-sized company providing industrial services. The purpose of the study is to analyze how different stakeholder perspectives join in determining what is perceived as valuable in business operations. Stakeholder relationships are studied during a three-year period when the company transformed from a division of a large industrial corporation into an independent service company. The data was collected through personal interviews and from Intranet documents, and analyzed with qualitative content analysis. Management, personnel, customers and owners are the key stakeholders in transformation of value creation. Based on the study, five elements of stakeholder relationships were identified as important in transformation of value creation: (1) History of the relationship, (2) Stakeholder’s objectives, (3) Interaction in the relationship, (4) Learning and information sharing and (5) Trust. The study contributes to literature on value creation by highlighting the complexity of stakeholder relationships and by showing that the salience of stakeholder relationships varies during the transformation.

Stakeholder Engagement: Practicing the Ideas of Stakeholder Theory

Stakeholder theory has become one of the major ways to conceptualize and comprehend business organizations in the fields of strategy and management.