By Charles kulwa n reg no 42688

A stakeholder approach to internal communication

If internal communication is the strategic management of interactions and relationship between stakeholders at all levels within organizations, these stakeholders need to be identified. This may seen an obvious step and it has been suggested in the past

Freeman (1984) stakeholders approach defines stakeholders as any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the firm’s objectives. Freeman (1984) struggled with the use of the term stakeholder. He initially rejected its use because he felt it was opposed to his external focused stakeholders approach to strategic management. The stakeholder approach calls for organizations to become more responsive to forces in their external environment by engaging in situational analysis and widening their understanding of their external stakeholders.

Freeman (1984) emphasize the need for organizations to keep an external focus: internal stakeholder must be seen as the conduit through which mangers reach other external stakeholders.

The stakeholders approach emphasise ethical management behaviour (Jones 1995). Moreover, ethical business practice such as the potter box approach (Parson2004) emphasises the need to identify and prioritize stakeholders

Differentiating internal stakeholder group could be approached from a number of directions such as segmentation by demographics or by occupation classification system for example the uk standard occupation classification system available at www. Statistics. gov.uk. Organization in different sectors will have  different employee groupings depending on their particular purpose. For example, in uk higher education the following staffs groupings are commonly identified: manual and ancillary. Academic support, administrative, academic and research. Alternatively Structural level could be used to identify broad organization stakeholders groups echoing the levels derived from Cheney and Christensen (2001) 

The level is strategic management, day to day management. Team and project management. Stakeholder’s theory encourages managers to consider different groups with different stakes in an organization. Applying this to internal communication results in the identification of participants representing different stakeholders groups at different level in organizations

Taken together  Stakeholders group , organization  level  and  participants  suggest  a series  of interrelated  dimension  of internal  communication . this  leads  to a refinement  of the initial  defi9nitons proposed earlier  with a  view of internal  communication as  the  strategic management  of interactions and relationship s between  stakeholders within  organizations across a number  of interrelated dimension  including, internal  line  manger  communication, internal corporate communication

These four interrelated   elements of internal communication can be considered dimensions of internal communication.  Aspect of internal communication includes participation in communication, its direction and then content of communication. The direction of internal communication flow between participants 

The four dimension of internal communication will be considered in turn, first line management occurs at every level within organization since senior manager answer to the chief executive officer as line manager. Line management communication relates to matters concerning employee roles and the impact of their personal communication. This type of communication involves methods such as target settings discussion and appraisal meetings. It relates to day to day management activities like like access to resources, financial management and human resource management.