Ondřej Částek

A Relationship between Stakeholder Management and Business Performance in the Czech Republic

The quality of a relationship with stakeholders is often perceived as a way to a competitive advantage of a company. In other words, many authors have defended a hypothesis that the application of stakeholder management leads to a higher business performance. However, empirical verification of such a hypothesis is not trivial. In the first place, the operationalization of the stakeholder management, quality of the relationship towards stakeholders or the importance of stakeholders is a challenge by itself. This article therefore aims to review empirical research of the relationship between stakeholder management and performance of companies located in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, the authors conclude that studies with factual results from the Czech Republic are almost none. Only two studies explicitly examine the relationship between stakeholder management and business performance. On top of that, both of these studies suffer from an inadequate research design.

A SURVEY OF STAKEHOLDER VISUALIZATION APPROACHES

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of studies for the representation/visualization of stakeholders with a proposal of our own method of visualization. The following text examines the existing representational methods and at the same time critically evaluates their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, our own proposed approach is also presented. The need to develop visualization methods for use in the concept of stakeholders has been accepted by researchers, and it is possible to encounter number of various alternatives which have been applied more or less successfully. The shared weakness of the majority of the models is that they only represent two main attributes simultaneously. When such models do contain three variables, then the third one is only a complementary aspect of the relationship compared to the two dominant attributes. Our proposed visualisation model based on three Mitchell´s (1997) stakeholder attributes should overcome the before mentioned disadvantage. Also, it takes into account the development over time in accordance with the dynamic of the relationships with the stakeholders. Therefore, the proposed three-dimensional model meets these needs and simultaneously removes the shortcomings of the other models, which are identified in our overview presented in this paper.

Identifying Corporate Performance Factors Based on FeatureSelection in Statistical Pattern Recognition: METHODS,APPLICATION, INTERPRETATION

This publication summarizes and extends methodology of feature selection (FS) and pattern recognition in search for competitiveness factors and methodology of corporate financial performance (CFP) measurement. Several methods were evaluated and Dependency-Aware Feature Ranking combined with non-linear regression model were applied. Also, this publication suggests and verifies methodology of interpretation results of the FS methods. For start was employed multidimensional linear regression, succeeded by clustering companies according to the factors identified by FS into homogenous groups, dividing them into quartiles based on their CFP and identifying similar values of the factors. This way was captured the non-linearity in the data.