Instrumental Stakeholder Theory Makes Ethically Based Relationship Building Palatable to Managers Focused on the Bottom Line

We appreciate the opportunity to engage in this dialogue with Weitzner and Deutsch (2019) to clarify the meaning and intent of some of the arguments found in our article, “How Applying Instrumental Stakeholder Theory Can Provide Sustainable Competitive Advantage” (Jones, Harrison, & Felps, 2018). We are grateful for the high praise from the authors regarding the rigor and logic of our applications of resource-based criteria to instrumental stakeholder theory (IST). We begin this response by highlighting a few areas of agreement, followed by some points where we disagree

How Applying Instrumental Stakeholder Theory Can Provide Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Instrumental stakeholder theory considers the performance consequences for firms of highly ethical relationships with stakeholders, characterized by high levels of trust, cooperation, and information sharing. While research suggests performance benefits, an obvious question remains: If instrumental stakeholder theory-based stakeholder treatment is so valuable, why isn\u27t it the dominant mode of relating to stakeholders? We argue that the existing instrumental stakeholder theory literature has three shortcomings that limit its ability to explain variance in performance. (1) Little theory exists around how instrumental stakeholder theory-based stakeholder management could provide sustainable competitive advantage. (2) The literature has largely neglected the potential downsides (i.e., costs) associated with pursuing these sorts of stakeholder relationships. (3) There is a paucity of theory on the contexts in which the incremental benefits of instrumental stakeholder theory-based stakeholder relationships are most likely to exceed the costs. As our primary contribution, we develop a theoretical path from a communal sharing relational ethics strategy--characterized by an intention to rely on relational contracts, joint wealth creation, high levels of mutual trust and cooperation, and communal sharing of property--to a close relationship capability, which we argue is valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate and, thus, a potential source of sustainable competitive advantage. We also consider the potential costs of achieving this capability and identify contexts in which the resulting relationships are likely to have the greatest net value

Mapping the journal of vocational behavior: a 23-year review

This article uses bibliometric analysis to review the Journal of Vocational Behavior (JVB) over 23 years. To conduct this review, we systematically analyzed 1490 JVB articles published from 1994 to 2016. We draw on this analysis to answer the questions: a) What key works did JVB articles build on during this period? and b) What key topics, articles, and trends appeared in the journal? We then provide empirically grounded reviews of major topic areas in JVB, and discuss recommendations for future research. This review is accompanied by two analytic science maps: 1) a co-citation map that reveals 466 key works referenced by JVB articles (http://bit.ly/JVBFoundationsMap), and 2) a topic map that reveals 353 JVB article topics, topic relations, topic trends, and citation rates associated with each topic (http://bit.ly/JVBTopicMap). These maps provide an overview of key vocational behavior topics and scholarship that readers can download and interactively explore to help guide their future research.</p

Greed and Fear in Network Reciprocity: Implications for Cooperation among Organizations

Extensive interdisciplinary literatures have built on the seminal spatial dilemmas model, which depicts the evolution of cooperation on regular lattices, with strategies propagating locally by relative fitness. In this model agents may cooperate with neighbors, paying an individual cost to enhance their collective welfare, or they may exploit cooperative neighbors and diminish collective welfare. Recent research has extended the model in numerous ways, incorporating behavioral noise, implementing other network topologies or adaptive networks, and employing alternative dynamics of replication. Although the underlying dilemma arises from two distinct dimensions—the gains for exploiting cooperative partners (Greed) and the cost of cooperating with exploitative partners (Fear)–most work following from the spatial dilemmas model has argued or assumed that the dilemma can be represented with a single parameter: This research has typically examined Greed or Fear in isolation, or a composite such as the K-index of Cooperation or the ratio of the benefit to cost of cooperation. We challenge this claim on theoretical grounds—showing that embedding interaction in networks generally leads Greed and Fear to have divergent, interactive, and highly nonlinear effects on cooperation at the macro level, even when individuals respond identically to Greed and Fear. Using computational experiments, we characterize both dynamic local behavior and long run outcomes across regions of this space. We also simulate interventions to investigate changes of Greed and Fear over time, showing how model behavior changes asymmetrically as boundaries in payoff space are crossed, leading some interventions to have irreversible effects on cooperation. We then replicate our experiments on inter-organizational network data derived from links through shared directors among 2,400 large US corporations, thus demonstrating our findings for Greed and Fear on a naturally-occurring network. In closing, we discuss implications of our main findings regarding Greed and Fear for the problem of cooperation on inter-organizational networks

Testing a Social-Cognitive Model of Moral Behavior: The Interactive Influence of Situations and Moral Identity Centrality

10.1037/a0015406Journal of Personality and Social Psychology971123-141JPSP

Long-run cooperation by Greed by Fear, with four levels of initial cooperation. (A) 10% Initial cooperators. (B) 30% Initial cooperators, (C) 50% Initial cooperators. (D) 70% Initial cooperators.

<p>The effects of Greed and Fear on long-run cooperation are highly nonlinear, with cooperation exploding or collapsing at particular combinations of Greed and Fear. With initial cooperators randomly dispersed, higher initial levels of cooperation generally make cooperation more viable at the system level, because the viability of cooperation depends on local clusters of cooperators. However, the relationship between initial cooperation and long-run cooperation is not simple and may even be non-monotonic in some conditions, depending on the levels of Greed and Fear.</p

Replication of experiment on empirical inter-organizational network data, with 90% initial cooperators.

<p>The model is applied to empirical data on relationships among 2,400 corporations, which are similar in several ways to the Moore neighborhood (high clustering, similar network size and density and thus similar average neighborhood size) but also include short path lengths and a skewed degree distribution. The figure shows that there is a primary cliff that is a function of both Greed and Fear. When Fear is high, cooperation is a gradually decreasing function of Greed. When Fear is low, Greed has little effect on cooperation over the bottom half of its range, and then cooperation falls steeply. At both low and high levels of Greed cooperation is relatively insensitive to Fear, but at middle levels of Greed cooperation plummets as Fear exceeds a moderately low value.</p

Long-run cooperation by Greed by Fear, with 90% initial cooperators.

<p>Results for high initial cooperation (90%) offer the most general and revealing view of the effect of Greed and Fear on cooperation. This highlights that the effects of Greed and Fear are nonlinear, as cooperation explodes (or collapses) at critical values of Greed and Fear. Although individual agents do not respond differently to Greed or Fear, the system-level effects of these two parameters of the dilemma are quite different, and these effects are interactive: The figure shows that there is a primary cliff that is a function of both Greed and Fear. When Fear is high, cooperation is a gradually decreasing function of Greed. When Fear is low, Greed has little effect on cooperation over the bottom half of the range, and then cooperation falls steeply. At both low and high levels of Greed cooperation is relatively insensitive to Fear, but at middle levels of Greed cooperation plummets as Fear exceeds a moderately low value.</p