Stakeholder Responsibility and Value Creation in Organizations: Insights from the Health Care Sector

Although there is an extensive literature on firms’ responsibility to its stakeholders, little attention has been given to stakeholders’ responsibility to organizations and to other stakeholders. We argue that organizations can create conditions and remove barriers that enable stakeholders to uphold important responsibilities that increase value creation. In order to better understand the organizational initiatives and practices that can reinforce stakeholder responsibility and the underlying mechanisms by which stakeholder responsibility may lead to value creation, we empirically explored a novel program implemented in a health care organization. Through a series of in-depth interviews with clinicians, patients, and health care organization management, we examined a structured health care program that focuses on motivating patients and health care professional, clinicians, and administrative staff to assume important responsibilities for health care outcomes. This occurred by increasing patient active participation in their own care and encouraging participation and coordination among health care professionals. We help narrow the gap between conceptual work and empirical inquiry into the value creation process and how it can be enhanced through innovations in stakeholder collaboration and responsibilities. We also contribute to the business ethics literature by emphasizing the role of multiple stakeholders in the process of value creation and better understanding stakeholder responsibility and value creation from multiple perspectives.