Managing in a Post-COVID-19 World: A Stakeholder Network Perspective

This article argues that technical leaders in a post-COVID-19 world should adopt stakeholder-oriented management techniques tailored to complex, chaotic, and disordered domains. In part, this is because the unprecedented breadth of the novel coronavirus's impact has required organizations to strengthen their stakeholder orientation, given the second-order, network effects of management decisions during a global pandemic on unseen, unknown constituencies. In part, this is because even our causal models and modes of group sense-making have been affected by the suffering and uncertainty caused by the pandemic. This article draws from ongoing research on complex stakeholder networks, applying recent advances in graph theory to establish that organizations with more resilient, more efficient, more globally connected stakeholder networks better satisfy the claims of their stakeholders, across an array of financial and environmental, social and governance metrics. This research can be extended into postcrisis, chaotic, and disordered domains by adapting the Cynefin framework, from the Welsh word for “habitat,” and applying it to the stakeholder theory literature. This stakeholder network perspective yields surprisingly simple and relevant tools for managers, as shown by a case study of the real-world performance of large US firms during the period of COVID-19’s initial diffusion and impact.