Quintelier Katinka J P
Department of Management and Organization, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2022 Feb 21;13:814624. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.814624. eCollection 2022.
A central claim in stakeholder theory is that, if we see stakeholders as human beings, we will attribute higher moral standing or show more moral consideration to stakeholders. But would the same hold for firms? In this paper, I apply the concepts of humanization and moral standing to firms, and I predict that (1) individuals attribute higher moral standing to stakeholder-oriented than to profit-oriented firms, because (2) individuals attribute more experience (such as feelings) to stakeholder-oriented than to profit-oriented firms. Five experiments support these predictions across different operationalizations of stakeholder and profit orientations. The analyses show that moral standing attributions are not fully explained by attributions of agency (such as thinking) to firms, or by attributions of experience or agency to human stakeholders (instead of firms). By unearthing the importance of experience attributions for moral standing attributions to firms, this work provides novel insights in ongoing legal, philosophical and public debates related to firms' moral standing. The findings also bring the debate about firms' moral standing to the heart of stakeholder theory, and lead to new normative and descriptive research questions about the interests of firms and their stakeholders.
利益相关者理论的一个核心主张是，如果我们将利益相关者视为人，我们就会赋予他们更高的道德地位，或者对利益相关者表现出更多的道德考量。但对于企业来说也是如此吗？在本文中，我将人性化和道德地位的概念应用于企业，并预测：（1）个体赋予以利益相关者为导向的企业比以利润为导向的企业更高的道德地位，因为（2）个体赋予以利益相关者为导向的企业比以利润为导向的企业更多的体验（如情感）。五项实验在利益相关者和利润导向的不同操作化方式下支持了这些预测。分析表明，道德地位归因并不能完全由对企业的能动性归因（如思考），或对人类利益相关者（而非企业）的体验或能动性归因来解释。通过揭示体验归因对于企业道德地位归因的重要性，这项研究为当前与企业道德地位相关的法律、哲学和公共辩论提供了新颖的见解。研究结果还将关于企业道德地位的辩论带入了利益相关者理论的核心，并引发了关于企业及其利益相关者利益的新的规范性和描述性研究问题。
