Faced with a globalized world, a complex business environment, in which markets are constantly changing, more demanding and competitive, managing stakeholders is essential to the company's success. Placing successful products on the market depends greatly on the level of stakeholders engaged, managing the different interests and influences of stakeholder’s groups. In this sense, stakeholder engagement is a key to the company's success, and all stakeholders will get better results as a result of this engagement.
One of the techniques recently used to increase employee engagement is the application of game elements in companies - gamification - in other words, providing playful and fun moments for employees that enable them to achieve company objectives and better results.
In this introduction we start by talking about stakeholders and the importance for companies to engage with stakeholders. After referring shortly, what is the methodology that we follow to get scientific literature about the problem and, for last, we describe how the paper is organized.
1.1. The Stakeholders Concepts
Companies, in developing their activities, are surrounded by an environment (internal and external) that, in part, influences the way they act and to achieve their goals, they increasingly have to identify their stakeholders, that is, the interested parties that have a relationship with them.
There are several definitions about Stakeholders, some broader than others. According to Freeman (2010) the concept was originally defined as “those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist”. Include employees, environmentalists near the company’s plants, vendors, governmental agencies, and more. And this definition is fundamental to the theory of stakeholder’s management. This is a perspective opposite to Friedman (1962) for whom the only stakeholders a company should care about are its shareholders (inspired in shareholder theory of capitalism: that a company’s sole responsibility is to make money for its shareholders). But to Freeman, the shareholders are merely one of many stakeholders in a company. The several definitions of stakeholders include just about anyone affected by the company and its workings, and are, therefore, essential pieces in strategic business planning, to the extent that they affect or are affected by the companies' decisions. However, if stakeholders feel the direct or indirect impacts of a company's decisions, the reverse may also be true.
Also, we can find various typologies of stakeholders, depending on the criteria used: primary stakeholders (those directly affected by a business and its activities or decisions) and secondary stakeholders (those who are indirectly affected by the business and may be connected with the main stakeholders). But Post, Preston and Sachs (2002) developed the idea that stakeholders can be classified into three categories: primary stakeholders, secondary stakeholders, and marginal stakeholders, those with minimal or casual interest.
More important than identifying stakeholders is to integrate them in a strategic management company. To Freeman (2010) the stakeholder’s approach to strategic management suggests that the companies must formulate and implement processes which satisfy the interested groups and manage and integrate the relationships and interest of shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, communities and other groups in a way that ensures the long-term success of the firm. And to achieve success in any business it needs to add value for all its stakeholders, so it is necessary to find out what the common ground is between all the interested parties, so that decisions can be made to meet/exceed the satisfaction of their expectations. The stakeholder’s management develops trusting relationships based on “principles of distributional, procedural, and interactional justice” (Harrison et al., 2010).