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.