Abstract

At present, the organisational landscape, which aims to provide value through its product and service offerings, must have the necessary infrastructure to deliver at the expected service levels. This requires the appropriate adaptation of existing frameworks, methods, and models to their business models, thereby generating consistent deliverables across time and industries. This is also applicable to Romanian Information Technology (IT) organisations, which face increasing pressure to deliver within the expected quality, time, and budget parameters. This study aims to assess the quality of stakeholder relationship management (SRM) as a higher-order organisational capability in Romanian IT organisations through a stakeholder-oriented subset of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) excellence framework and to explore its contribution to organisational quality, business continuity, and organisational resilience. A pilot study was conducted, using a sample of 52 Romanian IT professionals, to examine the applicability of four stakeholder-oriented MBNQA dimensions—Leadership and Governance, Workforce, Customers and Markets, and Community Engagement—as components of SRM quality. The findings provide preliminary evidence that these dimensions represent relevant elements for assessing SRM quality within the Romanian IT sector. Among them, the Workforce dimension exhibited the strongest association with SRM quality, highlighting the potential importance of employee engagement, Workforce development, and organisational learning in stakeholder-oriented excellence. The results also support the conceptualisation of SRM quality as a multidimensional construct that emerges from the interaction of complementary organisational subsystems. Although limited by its exploratory nature, sample size, and geographical focus, this study provides an initial foundation for applying the stakeholder-oriented subset of the MBNQA framework to stakeholder relationship management in the Romanian IT sector. Future research should validate the proposed model using larger, more diverse samples and examine its applicability across organisational, industrial, and geographical contexts.

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