How B Corp Leaders Engage Stakeholders in the Development of B Corp Strategies: Evidence From the Italian Context

As companies increasingly define success by measures beyond financial returns, leaders in recent decades have faced a pressing challenge: translating stakeholder-driven purpose into sustainability strategies that employees genuinely understand and enact. This exploratory study, framed in stakeholder theory and transformational leadership theory, investigates how B Corp leaders design and internally communicate B Corp strategies through stakeholder interaction. Fifteen semi-structured interviews with leaders of Italian B Corps and 24 structured interviews with employees of their organizations were analyzed using the Gioia methodology; the findings show that leaders integrate stakeholder insights within a cocreation process, involving internal and external actors in strategy development. Internally, consistent with transformational leadership theory, leaders act as role models and rely on direct communication to involve employees in sustainability initiatives. The results also suggest that longer employee tenure may heighten resistance to sustainability-oriented change, whereas higher organizational status facilitates understanding and alignment with sustainability strategies.