Managerial Networking and Stakeholder Support in Public Service Organizations

Resource dependence theory suggests that to function successfully, organizations must obtain certain resources controlled by actors in their environment. To do this effectively, managers often develop networking relationships with key stakeholder groups in order to make critical resources available. Managers in public service organizations, in particular, are frequently under great pressure to network with relevant actors from stakeholder groups in order to build support for service (co)production and legitimacy for strategic and operational decisions. To identify networking strategies which are conducive to stakeholder support, we explore the networking behaviour of over 1,000 English local government managers. Fuzzy cluster analysis identifies four distinctive, though inter-related types of managerial networking: technical, reputational, political, and tokenistic. The cluster membership functions from this analysis are used to examine the relationship between types of networking and stakeholder support in depth. The results of hierarchical regression analysis suggest that technically-orientated networking is the most conducive to stakeholder support, with tokenistic networking the least conducive.