Grouped Stakeholders' Journeys: A Dynamic Social Impact Theory Perspective

ABSTRACT While customer journey research is proliferating, acumen of the broader stakeholder journey (SJ), which addresses any stakeholder's (e.g., an employee's, supplier's, or customer's) journey with the firm, remains more nascent. In particular, understanding of the role of psychological mechanisms in shaping collective or grouped stakeholders’ journeys , aggregated stakeholders' shared trajectory of role‐related touchpoints and activities, enacted through their joint engagement, which shape their shared experience with the firm (e.g., the shared journeys of employee unions or teams, customer advocacy groups, supplier collectives, competitors' organizations, or industry associations), lags behind. To bridge this gap, we adopt group‐centric dynamic social impact theory (DSIT) to examine the effect of dynamic social impact (social influence) on grouped stakeholders' journey with the firm. Drawing on the 7C framework, we develop a set of propositions that explore the effect of grouped stakeholders' DSIT tenets of stakeholder consolidation, clustering, correlation, and continuing diversity on their joint engagement and experience through their journey with the firm, offering novel insight. We conclude by deriving key theoretical (e.g., by inviting future empirical testing of the propositions) and practical implications from our analysis (e.g., by proposing strategies to facilitate constructive stakeholder interactions).