Urgency, along with power and legitimacy, is one of the key determinants of stakeholder salience. Determining which requests have the greatest urgency and how to respond to them is a continuing challenge in stakeholder management. Based on 54 interviews, I study how firms assess investors’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) requests. I find that firms infer urgency from the level of resources that stakeholders commit to their request and match this resource commitment in their response. I propose that urgency accounts for strategic resource commitments in firm-stakeholder interactions and refines existing theories of how firms respond to stakeholder requests.
