Essays on long-term stakeholder relationships in transition: digitalization and globalization in Mittelstand firms

Stakeholder theory states that firms can be viewed as a group of stakeholders and must strategically manage these stakeholder relationships based on their interests and needs to create optimal value. Besides having limited resources and a lack of management skills, Mittelstand firms are facing new challenges related to increasing globalization and digitalization and aspects of these such as automation and innovation, which can impact their business infrastructure as well as the market environment of various stakeholder groups. The overall objective of this dissertation, building on 22 interviews with top managers in Mittelstand firms and the theory-driven systematic literature review in paper 1, is to analyze four current challenges (papers 2 to 5) for Mittelstand firms and understand how to maintain relationships with stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and employees in the face of increasing digitalization and globalization as well as selected aspects of these such as automation and innovation.
In summary, the results show that various stakeholder groups are affected by increasing digitalization and globalization and aspects such as automation and innovation. However, the extent of the impact is context-dependent and therefore influenced by certain factors. The results indicate that transformational leadership seems to have a positive effect on supplier relational stability when Mittelstand firms have low degrees of automation and are less affected by globalization. In addition, globalized Mittelstand firms and non-family Mittelstand firms seem to be more resilient to pandemic crises if they highly digitalized their business model before the pandemic crisis. Moreover, Mittelstand firms with a high degree of ambidexterity appear more susceptible to efforts to increase automation, leading to lower employee relational stability. These findings suggest that Mittelstand firms are affected differently by the challenges of increasing digitalization, globalization, and aspects of these such as automation and innovation and that Mittelstand firms deal with these challenges differently depending on the situation.