Managing Mental Standards with Corporate Citizenship Profiles

Stakeholder expectations of corporate responsibility are growing and thus understanding the dynamics of expectations is becoming important for companies. Stakeholder expectations that are met open doors for stakeholder favor, whereas unmet expectations may hinder or even prevent collaboration. While all companies are expected to be responsible enough to keep away from causing harm to others, a competitive edge can only be achieved if the minimum expectations are exceeded. The paper suggests that companies can both exceed and manage stakeholder expectations in practice by building up a corporate citizenship profile that gives direction to their specialization in responsibility. This niche can be labeled for example environmental, cultural or technological corporate citizenship. The value of such labeling is that it can make the corporate responsibility of an individual company easier to communicate. This is important, as creating competitive edge with responsibility sets high standards for communication, since stakeholders view messages concerning responsibility with a great deal of criticism, or even cynicism. As good deeds of today tend to turn into expectations of tomorrow, meeting stakeholder expectations can become crucial for company success. Thus, expectations need to be both understood and managed.