12.3.3 Important stakeholders

The second issue addressed in these results is the question regarding which stakeholders the supervisory director should be loyal to and whose interests he should look after. The results of this question are shown in Table 12-4. Shareholders, employees, suppliers, customers, the state, society and providers of debt1 were suggested as possible stakeholders in the survey. The interests of shareholders should be looked after according to 96.8%, 85.6% and 91.4% of the supervisory directors in listed, non-listed and family-owned companies, respectively. This is in accordance with the agency theory. The support for shareholders’ interests is much smaller in non-profit organisations, such as 13.9% in healthcare institutions and 15.8% in housing associations. This is trivial, because non-profit organisations do not have shareholders. The overall score for the group shareholders is 56.3%, lower than the score of 71.9% of employees. However, a more consistent view is observed here, as the scores for employees range from 63.2% (housing association) to 87.1% (listed companies). Although the interests of employees are considered to be of less importance to supervisory directors in listed companies, the 87.1% is the highest score for all the groups of respondents. Together with the non-listed (73.5%) and family-owned companies (74.1%), the listed companies attach higher value to employee rights than the non-profit organisations (healthcare institutions 70.8%, housing associations 63.2%, other 69.4%). The reason for the difference between profit and non-profit organisations is probably the fact that employees have a much smaller role in the non-profit organisations.

Table 12-4: The scores of the different suggested stakeholders and the distributions over the different organisations. Each score indicates the percentage of respondents that regards a particular suggested stakeholder as a stakeholder whose interests should be looked after by a supervisory director.

The stakeholder with the least support from supervisory directors is suppliers. On average 14.3% of the participants responded that a supervisory director should consider their interests. Customers should also be in the minds of supervisory directors when monitoring management. Although some dispersion can be observed, 60.2% of the respondents attach importance to the interests of customers. Although profit organisations rely on customers in order to make a profit, non-profit organisations consider customers’ interests more (79.2%, 69.7% and 72.2%) than profit organisations (67.7%, 47.7% and 41.4%).

The state and society are two less specific stakeholders, which lack a contractual relationship with the company such as the four previously discussed stakeholder groups have. Although such a contractual relationship does not exist, the respondents attach value to their interests. Society receives support from 64.7% of the respondents, with the scores of listed companies, healthcare institutions, housing associations and other organisations exceeding the 70% level. The results for the state are lower: on average 32.6%. The results for healthcare institutions, housing associations and other are higher. A possible explanation is the influence of the state on these types of organisations from a legal standpoint.

Providers of debt are the last stakeholders in the table. On average 36.5% of the respondents are of the opinion that the board should monitor for this particular group. In listed (58.1%), non-listed (40.2%) and family-owned companies (39.7%) this is considered to be more important than in non-profit organisations (33.3%, 28.9% and 22.2%).