It’s Turtles All the Way down: Target Fixation and the Costs of Stakeholder Engagement in Environmental Management

Abstract

While stakeholder engagement can benefit managers, its implications for decision-making are not well understood. Integrating literature on stakeholder engagement and institutional theory, this paper investigates the ramifications of stakeholder involvement on organizational decision-making. It employs a qualitative comparative case study of agency managers and stakeholders involved in sea turtle management at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to investigate the motivations and goals of different organizational actors. The results demonstrate that stakeholders can be prone to target fixation, focusing on different goals than their organization intends. Furthermore, they reveal that stakeholders’ motivations are highly resistant to attempts to align them with organizational goals, creating goal misalignment which can disrupt decision-making. These findings provide a more holistic understanding of how stakeholder engagement influences organizational management processes, formalizes how target fixation operates at the individual level, and provides critical information for administrators deciding how to utilize engagement strategies in their work.

Keywords:

• Environmental management
• goal misalignment
• participation
• stakeholder engagement
• target fixation

Acknowledgements

This article was built out of the author’s thesis work, published at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Mistur 2020). Additionally. This study would have been impossible without the support of members of the Sea Turtle Co-op at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (GNDR). Their willingness to participate and assist was invaluable and must be acknowledged. The perspectives and conclusions presented in this article are solely the author’s and do not represent the views of the GDNR.

Notes

1 The Co-op engages participants from the Caretta Foundation, the Caretta Research Project, the Cumberland Island National Seashore, Georgia Southern University, the Jekyll Island Authority/Georgia Sea Turtle Center, the Little Cumberland Island Homeowners Association, the St. Catherine’s Island Foundation, the St. Simon’s Island Sea Turtle Project, Sea Island Co., The Lodge at Little St. Simon’s Island, the Tybee Island Marine Science Center, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.