Communicating Moral Responsibility: Stakeholder Capitalism, Types, and Perceptions

Abstract

With stakeholder capitalism being the new mantra for corporate moral responsibility, the question of how corporations’ moral commitments inconsistent with their executions would variably influence internal and external stakeholders and for different types of stakeholder capitalism issues remains unanswered. Using a 2 (inconsistency: present/absent) × 2 (stakeholder: internal/external) × 5 (stakeholder-capitalism issues: worker/environment/shareholder/customer/community) between-subjects experiment, this study investigated the variable impact on stakeholders’ corporate hypocrisy perceptions. With data collected from 1296 U.S. stakeholders, ANOVA results revealed that corporate moral responsibility messages-action inconsistency generates hypocrisy among stakeholders such that external stakeholders, namely consumers, experienced higher hypocrisy than internal ones, namely employees. The context of corporate moral responsibility (i.e., the types of stakeholder-capitalism issues) did not moderate resulting perceptions, but these issues directly impacted hypocrisy perceptions. These perceptions varied between external and internal stakeholders for different issues; the highest hypocrisy was recorded for shareholders and workers issues. Thus, the focus of this research was foregrounded on corporations’ moral responsibilities perceived as inconsistent with their execution to present a comparative analysis of different groups of stakeholders’ responses and devise effective solutions.