Nestlé South Africa: leading multi-stakeholder partnership response in the COVID-19 context

Abstract

Learning outcomes The learning outcomes are as follows: identifying and prioritising of stakeholders’ needs during crises; gaining insight into applying contextual intelligence in leaders’ decision-making on philanthropic investments; and evaluating initiatives by differentiating between creating shared value and corporate social responsibility. Case overview/synopsis On 15 March 2020, Bruno Olierhoek, Chairman and MD, Nestlé East and Southern Africa considers his dilemma of where to focus his community support initiatives during COVID-19, which could reflect their company’s purpose of enhancing quality of life and contributing to a healthier future in their response to the crisis? Also, creating shared value (CSV) was in their DNA as a company, and they wanted to do more than philanthropic gestures; therefore, they had to decide carefully about leveraging their strategic partnerships in the relief effort. The case highlights existing community involvement projects, pre-COVID-19, which illustrate multi-stakeholder collaboration. These existing trust relationships and partnerships are then leveraged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The case highlights unintended consequences of Nestlé’s gesture of donating food products to the 5,000 frontline health-care workers for specific stakeholder groups, such as the positive emotional responses of Nestlé’s own employees. These events in the case relate to existing theoretical frameworks, such as corporate citizenship which elicits pro-organisational behaviour in stakeholder groups. Complexity academic level Postgraduate programmes MBA or MPhil. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS: 7 Management Science

CSR during COVID-19: exploring select organizations’ intents and activities

“…The immediate response of organizations has been positive toward taking responsibility toward their employees (can be seen in the first-order themes of aggregate dimension one) in terms of continued compensation and staying agile with the industry's ongoing trends. On the other hand, based on aggregate dimension two, the organizations have also incentivized the existing networks or connections, similar to findings reported by Pillay and Scheepers (2020), to pool funds and resources to direct them toward COVID-19 relief measures. Most organizations have responded to the crisis at once and quickly embedded COVID-19 relief activities into their CSR strategy.…”

“…On the other hand, the opportunity to "build/repair" the relationships with the communities during the COVID-19 outbreak was identified to be a strong motivator for organizations (Francis and Pegg, 2020). Along with multi-stakeholder collaboration, a case study on Nestle's COVID-19 CSR efforts in South Africa brought to light the power of leveraging existing trust-based relationships and strategic partnerships during a global crisis (Pillay and Scheepers, 2020). Indicating the importance of immediate CSR response to the organizations' long-term survival, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley, through their working paper, quoted, "We discover that CSR strengthened corporate resilience to COVID-19" (Levine, 2020, p. 1).…”

Stakeholder salience: corporate responses during a public health crisis

“…Second, a large-scale, quantitative methodology has its limitation in uncovering the dynamic process of stakeholder engagement. A recent case study has used Nestle as an example to reveal how a multinational firm takes into account the local community stakeholders' needs in developing its charity practices (Pillay & Scheepers, 2020). More qualitative studies following corporate responses to engage stakeholders during the pandemic will help us gain a more refined understanding of the cycle of stakeholder engagement and address questions such as when and why particular stakeholders' concerns gain priority in corporate policies.…”

“…The attributes of stakeholders' power, legitimacy, and urgency can be used to identify the salient stakeholders at a given time (Mitchell, Agle, & Wood, 1997), particularly the shift of salience toward the societal stakeholders. Based on the sample of large public firms in the US, we find corporate COVID-19 responses include customer-oriented practices to provide business operation flexibility, and employee-oriented practices, such as remote working policy and paid sick leave (Collings, Nyberg, Wright, & McMackin, 2021), as well as charity efforts in the form of a community relief fund (Pillay & Scheepers, 2020). Specifically, we find that corporations with a larger number of employees, representing power, and social media followers, representing legitimacy, tend to adopt more corporate responses that are addressing stakeholders' concerns.…”

State of the Art of COVID-19 and Business, Management, and Accounting Sector. A Bibliometrix Analysis

“…Caren Brenda Scheepers is an assistant professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her studies focused on the resistance that companies have in sharing value before and after COVID demonstrating the ability to share value through the Nestlé case study in South Africa (Pillay & Scheepers, 2020a). Furthermore, she studies the effect that COVID on her area related to the transport of food in South Africa using taxi sector (Pillay & Scheepers, 2020b, pag.…”