Stakeholder Management and Corporate Sustainability: A Configurational Approach

The instrumental theory of stakeholder management has largely focused on financial performances while overlooking other corporate performances, such as corporate sustainability. This research aims to explore how stakeholder management influences corporate sustainability from a configurational approach by proposing that three distinct yet interdependent stakeholder-related elements, namely, stakeholder prioritization, stakeholder breadth, and stakeholder engagement depth, in combination are linked with corporate sustainability. We also construct corporate sustainability from a temporal perspective by focusing on the extent to which companies take a long-term orientation, as an inherent feature, toward corporate sustainability. Our findings reveal multiple stakeholders configurations associated with corporate sustainability.