Prioritization of organizational stakeholders: A managerial decision-making perspective

• We investigate stakeholder prioritization processes in different types of firms. • Senior managers rely on three distinct logics when prioritizing stakeholders. • Introspective logic is the primary driver of stakeholder prioritization. • Mature firms have a more comprehensive prioritization system than startups. This study investigates the decision-making logics that managers use in their day-to-day stakeholder prioritization decisions. Our empirical data consists of semi-structured interviews of senior managers with stakeholder management responsibilities in different organizational contexts. We find that managers rely on three distinct logics – introspective, relational, and attributive – in justifying their stakeholder prioritization decisions. Introspective logic is the main determinant of the long-term stakeholder prioritization strategy, which managers adjust case-by-case based on relational and attributive logics. We further find that managers in mature companies generally draw on a more comprehensive set of factors in their stakeholder prioritization decisions than those in startups. These findings contribute to the literature by providing important nuance to our understanding of how managers interpret stakeholder salience and demonstrating that internal organizational factors, rather than stakeholder attributes, are frequently the primary driver of stakeholder prioritization decisions.