Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 15, 2004

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting

Exploring New Terrain in Stakeholder Management and Firm Performance Through the Constructs of Procedural Justice, Commitment, and Trust

This study offers an alternative to the predominant stockholder view by considering the stakeholder theory of the firm advanced by Freeman (1984). Stakeholder theory has a central focus on ethics in corporate governance, and is normative at its core as it tells top managers what they should do from an ethical standpoint with attention given to the various stakeholder groups of the firm, and not just the stockholders. Within the framework of stakeholder theory, this study will consider top managers moral values based on the importance they give to justice, trust, and commitment in their dealings with stakeholders. The overriding belief of this study is that the greater attention a manager gives to each of these areas in dealing with their stakeholder groups, the better their firm will perform financially.