Subjective stakeholder dynamics relationships treatment: a methodological approach using fuzzy decision-making

© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Since the stakeholder theory was proposed to explain the interaction among its agents, extensive approaches have been developed. However, the literature continues to suggest the development of new methodologies that allow an analysis of the dynamics and uncertainty of the relationships between each agent. In this sense, this research proposes a novel methodology for the treatment of subjective stakeholder dynamics using fuzzy decision-making. The study proposes a mathematical methodological perspective for the treatment of subjective relationships among stakeholders, which allows a predictive simulation tool to be developed for attitude and personal preferences to analyze the links among all stakeholders. A mathematical application is developed to help the decision-making process in uncertainty concerning the ordering-according-to-their-importance and linking-of-relation algorithms, which are based on notions of relation, gathering and ordering. A numerical example is proposed to understand the method’s usefulness and feasibility. The results approximate how stakeholder ambiguity and fuzziness can be managed considering the decision-maker’s preference subjectivity. In addition, these results highlight the different relationships among each stakeholder, their intensity levels, the incidence linkage loops and the incidence relative on stakeholder behaviors. The main implication of this proposition is to deal with the subjective preferences provide by decision-maker to better interpret environmental and subjective factors. Furthermore, this study contributes to the strategic planning and decision-making processes for operative units within uncertain environment in the short term