O impacto das políticas para stakeholders sobre o desempenho organizacional das companhias de capital aberto no Brasil: uma conexão ( in) provável

Abstract

The object of this research is to evaluate to which extent the policies for stakeholders affect the organizational performance. Policies are considered for four different sets of stakeholders: shareholders, costumers, employees and environment. Our research seeks to depth the relations understanding among organizations and the stakeholders, based on the instrumental relation. We seek to understand why these organizations adopt policies for stakeholders, considering that they spend resources with these policies. The analytical structure that grounds our research is based on instrumental propositions to build a stakeholders theory. These propositions consider that the organizations objective is the search for profit and the stakeholders are instruments that make possible this course of action. This implies to consider that the importance of stakeholders is not established through ethical duty, but according to its significance for organizations financial and economical performance. The questions that guide our research are: 1. In what measure the adoption of certain policies for stakeholders affect the organizational performance? 2. Which performance indicators are affected by the adoption of policies for stakeholders? Our research was realized within 136 open capital companies, which operate at São Paulo Stock Market BOVESPA. The data was collected for the period of 1998 to 2001. The performance indicators were extracted of Balance Sheets and the main part of the data of policies for stakeholders was obtained through administration reports. The research methodology used in this thesis is predominantly quantitative, establishing relations among a set of policies for stakeholders and the organizational performance through multiple regressions. The data are structured in cross-section and time-series forms and organized in panels. It means that the characteristics of a sample are analyzed during a period of time. The data in panel allows us to identify and measure the effects of behavior shifts that cannot be detected through cross-sections and time-series in separate. Besides the quantitative analyzes, we elaborated some case studies, based on interviews, whose objective was to complement some results from the quantitative research. We made 10 interviews with companies directors and CEOs, which belonged to the quantitative research sample. The objectives of these interviews were to compound the case studies and offer some variables that could help to understand how the organizations perceive the importance of social responsibility policies and how the policies for stakeholders are decided. According to the results we could conclude that the policies for stakeholders are important for companies in a way that they are highly adopted. The managers recognize the importance of stakeholders although they affirm that the biggest part of policies is undertaken due to external pressure, mainly conducted by the community, environmentalists and others. They also recognize that they havent developed any formal internal structure toimplement and monitor these policies. However, the fact of not disposing of evaluating criteria for the cost/benefit relation in such policies may indicate that they dont seek to obtain financial/economical results. It is possible to acknowledge that if the policies for stakeholders were adopted aiming at financial results, the managers would develop precise criteria to analyze this relation. In this research, we did not find clear relations between the adoption of policies for stakeholders and the performance. We can conclude that the performance variables used in this research are not explained by policies for stakeholders in a set. It is also possible to conclude that these variables may be explained by other variables, which were not contemplated in this research. We can suppose, based on our sample, that the policies for stakeholders do not affect the organizational performance. We can also assume that the motivations for undertaking such policies are different and can be expressed as: external pressure, Brazilian law, the necessity of motivate and set tle the employees, among others, it is, variables which were not considered in this research.