Multiple Stakeholder Identities

Stakeholders do not always have singular identities with regard to a focal organization. That is, some stakeholders play multiple roles regarding the organization and therefore may occupy overlapping stakeholder identities (Rowley and Moldoveaunu, 2003). A customer might be an employee (e.g., I might take an evening course at the university where I am on faculty); a volunteer may also be a client (e.g., Red Cross volunteers may find themselves in need of emergency aid during a disaster); a community member may also be an employee, and so forth. There are many such overlapping stakeholder identities. We can also see that individuals may identify with various subgroups within or relative to an organization. Scott (1997; 1999) refers to these as multiple targets of identification. Our targets can include multitudes of identities that are salient for us including: cohorts (e.g., employees who were hired at the same time; groups of clients in the same age range; volunteers who were trained together), workgroups, professional affiliations, and areas of expertise among many others. This makes the mapping of stakeholders during change a much more challenging task because you cannot necessarily peg any one individual or group to a single perspective that they represent or with which they affiliate.