Linking Stakeholder Salience to Value Creation: A Stakeholder-Resource-Based View (SRBV) Perspective and Evidence from Technology-enabled Start-up Firms in Nigeria and Canada

<p dir="ltr">One of the most critical advances in stakeholder discussions is the Mitchell, Agle, and Wood stakeholder salience model, which is used to identify and prioritize relevant firm stakeholders. However, the model's comprehensiveness has been questioned, with several calls for the inclusion of additional constructs and theoretical development to enhance its prescriptive accuracy. Additionally, existing literature linking stakeholder salience to corporate performance has produced mixed results, with no conclusive prescription on how or whether stakeholder salience can enable the firm’s value creation process, despite several scholarly calls in this regard. To address these gaps, this thesis explored three interrelated research questions: (1) What is the empirical role of stakeholder proximity, stakeholder multiplicity, and social capital in identifying and prioritizing salient stakeholders? (2) What is the nature of the relationship between stakeholder salience and the value creation process of firms? (3) What is the nature of the relationship between aligning with stakeholder goals, firm goals, and firm performance based on the fundamental understanding of the unequal salience of stakeholders in a firm’s network? Using SRBV, stakeholder salience, and goal setting theory as theoretical perspectives, this thesis obtained survey data from 232 respondents from technology-enabled start-up firms in Nigeria and Canada. The results suggest that stakeholder proximity and multiplicity have a significant and positive influence on stakeholder salience, while stakeholder salience has a significant and positive influence on stakeholder integration and value creation. Lastly, the results suggest that aligning with stakeholder goals, without the premise of stakeholder integration or stakeholder salience, will lead to negative firm performance. This Ph.D. thesis contributes significantly to the academic literature by (1) refining and improving the prescriptive accuracy of the stakeholder salience model, (2) underscoring the importance of and the appropriateness of the SRBV theory in the value creation logic of the firm, (3) developing and utilizing the consolidated SRBV theory to test empirical relationships related to the theory, (4) contributing to the research on the organizational antecedents to value creation and goal setting. In practice, this thesis enables the firm and its managers to accurately assess and identify its salient stakeholders who contribute to value creation.</p>