The Stakeholder Salience Model Revisited: Evidence from Agri-Food Cooperatives in Spain

In recent decades, the importance of cooperatives in agri-food markets has been evident. Specifically, in Spain they represent a very important part of the agri-food industry. However, there is no significant evidence of substantial differences in their management, different from the general business case. The main objective of this study is to examine how a certain organizational context influences manager decisions and perceptions. The purpose is studying whether this influence causes changes to the main conclusions of the stakeholder salience original model. The working methodology consists of carrying out an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (from the data of 352 agri-food cooperatives in Spain) in order to test the psychometric properties of measurement scales, and the hypothesized relationships between attributes and stakeholder salience results are examined using structural equation modeling. Results show that the measurement of the stakeholder salience varies in agri-food cooperatives. The contributions of this study are to confirm that: (1) in agri-food cooperatives legitimacy is the first measurement of stakeholder salience, unlike the general business case where that is power; (2) the attribute of urgency remains unchanged from the proposed model; and (3) add to the original model the attribute of durability because of the permanence of the interest of stakeholders in agri-food cooperatives.