Stakeholder Management in Social Ventures – Exploring the Effects of Stakeholder Salience, Trust and Conflict on Social Enterprise Performance

The aim of this article is to provide the reader with empirical data in the domain of stakeholder management in social ventures, as empirical findings are currently missing in this area of research. In order to show how social entrepreneurs manage different constituencies towards higher success of the organization, a stakeholder identification and salience framework is applied to the social enterprise model trying to explain how key stakeholders are able to influence the organization. Furthermore, different performance metrics for social enterprises are explored. Finally, stakeholder salience as well as antecedents of each relation, notably conflicts and trust are linked to a multi-dimensional performance indicator. Based on these considerations a survey measuring each construct in order to test the model empirically on a sample of German social enterprises is developed.