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This article:
What is the stakeholder salience concept?
Management of project stakeholder and saliency
Legitimacy
Power
Urgency
How do the dimensions overlap?
Dominant stakeholders
Dangerous stakeholders
Dependent stakeholders
Definitive stakeholders
Non-stakeholders
Other types of stakeholders
How to use the salience modeling
What is the stakeholder salience concept?
Mitchell, Agle, and Wood (1997) proposed the stakeholder saliency model. They define salience to be:
The degree to which managers give priority for competing stakeholder claims.
The model considers how vocal, visible, and important a stakeholder, allowing you create a typology for stakeholders to whom to pay attention.
Management of project stakeholder and saliency
Project management is based on people. You need the project team to accomplish your goals. This team may include members from different stakeholder groups. It is common to have a core group of people who work daily or at least regularly on the project. Then, there is a wider stakeholder community.
The saliency model can be used to engage stakeholders in stakeholder analysis, management and engagement. It allows you to categorize stakeholders and help you decide the best way for them to be involved in your project.
There are three factors to consider that highlight the importance of a stakeholder. In other words, how high priority you should give this stakeholder.
These are the three main considerations:
Legitimacy
Power
Urgency.
Let’s take a look at each one.
Legitimacy
This is a measure how much a stakeholder has to request the project.
Legitimate stakeholders may have a claim on the way the project is executed. This could be based on a legal right, morality, or any other claim to authority.
The project’s progress will be influenced by the strategic management layer of an organization, as well key customers or clients.
Power
This is how much control they have over actions or outcomes. Their power could be due to their hierarchical status, prestige, money invested from a shareholder, ownership of the resources required to deliver the outcome, and similar.
Because larger projects tend to attract more corporate governance and oversight, it is likely that there will be more people with power involved.
Urgency
This indicates how urgent they require attention and how unacceptable a delay/action is to them.
An expectation of high urgency may be due to some type of ownership, past experience in which urgent action was taken, that continues to lead to continued expectations of comparable responses times, a time-sensitive issue that creates exposure for the stakeholder or similar.
How often are they likely bring you urgent issues, for example? Things that cannot wait
These three elements together can be used to assess how involved a stakeholder in the project is. This information is valuable for tailoring engagement activities and deciding with whom to spend your time.
You may be familiar with the classic stakeholder analysis interest and impact grid. Stakeholder saliency can be used to further classify stakeholder types. Stakeholder saliency is simply another tool for identifying stakeholder types. I find impact and interests easier than stakeholder salience. However, it is worth learning to better understand the theory of stakeholder sustenance to help you decide what actions to take and how to overlap.
This picture illustrates how power, legitimacy, urgency and saliency can be combined to give stakeholders more or lesser saliency.
Project managers love a good Venn diagram!
Stakeholders who fall into areas that have two or more elements of saliency should be aware of them and spend the most time with them.
Thes are defined by Mitchell, Agle, Wood
