Balancing Collaboration and Control in Stakeholder Management

As e-government becomes increasingly pervasive in modern public administrative management, its influence on organizations and individuals has become hard to ignore. It is therefore timely and relevant to examine e-governance—the fundamental mission of e-government. By adopting a stakeholder perspective and coming from the strategic orientation of control and collaboration management philosophy, this study approaches the topic of e-governance in e-government from the three critical aspects of stakeholder management: (1) identification of stakeholders, (2) recognition of differing interests among stakeholders, and (3) how an organization caters to and furthers these interests. Findings from the case study allow us to identify four important groups of stakeholders known as the Engineers, Dissidents, Seasoners, and Skeptics who possess vastly different characteristics and varying levels of acceptance of and commitment towards the e-filing paradigm. Accordingly, four corresponding management strategies with varying degrees of collaboration and control mechanisms are devised in the bid to align these stakeholder interests such that their participation in e-government can be leveraged by public organizations to achieve competitive advantage.