Digital is Different: Digitalization Undermines Stakeholder Relations Because It Impedes Firm Anthropomorphization

Digitalization is typically seen as an operational and/or strategic issue. We go beyond such a view and present findings suggesting that digitalization may also affect how people relate to a firm. The guiding intuitions of our research are that digitalization may impede firm anthropomorphization, i.e., the attribution of human-like capacities of mind (‘agency’ and ‘experience’) to firms, and that this may affect stakeholder relations. Specifically, we suspect that digitalization is likely to undermine a firm’s ability to establish and maintain the sort of communal (trusting and cooperative) relations that stakeholder theory sees as crucial for value creation. We find support for these intuitions in four experimental studies (total N = 819): people attribute less experience (but not less agency) to more digitalized firms and this reduces their willingness to affiliate with, trust, or enact pro-social behavior towards such firms. We also find that these effects are stronger for communally-oriented respondents, and that one reason that people are less inclined to enter into a relationship with a more digitalized firm is that they believe that this will make it more difficult to enact communal behaviors. Together, our findings suggest that firm digitalization may, ceteris paribus, undermine firms’ ability to generate value.