Teeing off Stakeholder Management

: a Study of Swedish Golf Clubs

Abstract

Stakeholder management is a widely researched and debated topic amongst academics; however, there are still research gaps. Most research is based on large for-profit firms; hence, researchers have called for more studies in other contexts to help develop stakeholder theory, making it more applicable and practically useful for managers in a vaster range of organisations.The purpose with this dissertation is to explain how stakeholder management practises influence organisational outcome in non-profit organisations. Stakeholder management was conceptualised to consist of three parts: a process, a strategy and an ethical identity, and organisational outcome as reputation. The study has a positive and deductive approach; hence, a cross-sectional research design was used. The quantitative method chosen was a web based self-completion survey distributed by email, which was distributed to the total population of Swedish golf clubs.The findings of the study are that the stakeholder management process positively affects the following dimensions of reputation; quality, and visibility. The organisations ethical identity had a significant negative relationship to the quality and visibility dimensions of reputation. The stakeholder management strategy did not significantly affect any dimensions of reputation. Stakeholder management as a whole had effect on attractiveness, quality and visibility dimensions of reputation.The limitations are that only one industry is included in the study and that the results cannot be generalised to other populations. The implications of this study are that the stakeholder management process is the component of stakeholder management that affect non-financial outcome positively, whereas the ethical identity is negatively related to non-financial outcome.The original value of the study is a new conceptualisation of stakeholder management and the choice to test the conceptualisation on an interesting non-profit industry.