Complementarities Between Stakeholder Management and Participative Management: Evidence From the Youth Care Sector

Abstract

This article analyzes how stakeholder management is applied in the case of special youth guidance homes in Belgium. It describes a specific situation in which a major stakeholder—adolescents in the homes—is part of the process. Our research illustrates the different organizational roles and the complementarities between stakeholder management and participative management. Although stakeholder management is important for strategic decision making, participation is more important on an operational management level. Our cases illustrate that important stakeholders, for example, the customers—the adolescents and their parents—as well as employees in the homes evaluate participation on an operational level as being more important than participation in the board or in strategic management decision making in the organization. By disentangling the distinction between the operational level and the policy level of stakeholder management, our research links participative management and stakeholder management while clarifying the application of stakeholder management in the nonprofit sector.