Erin Henry
Harvard Business School
Not Just Keeping the Lights On: Finding Mutual Gain in Stakeholder Engagement at a Utility
Organizations face diverse demands from numerous external stakeholders. This research develops a deeper understanding of how managers in organizations respond to institutional complexity through a case study of a utility and its stakeholders. I introduce the concept of push-pull stakeholder engagement, which I define as a form of stakeholder engagement in which the organization pulls in elements of the environment to shape organizational characteristics, while pushing the organization out into its environment to authentically engage external stakeholders. I show that, through push-pull stakeholder engagement, the utility’s managers were able to attend to the convergent and divergent interests of stakeholders by leveraging both internal, organizational and external, community features.
Biography
Erin Henry is a student in the Organizational Behavior and Sociology PhD program at Harvard Business School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She holds an MBA in General Management from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a BA in Economics and International Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to her doctoral studies, Erin worked in corporate social responsibility and supplier diversity. Her research interests include the corporate social responsibility, cross-sector collaborations, and institutional change.