How is the tension between conflict and deliberation resolved in shareholder engagement? We address this question by studying shareholder engagement as a deliberative process with three stages: establishing dialogue, solution development, and solution implementation. We theorize that two interactionist mechanisms, deliberative interaction and the voicing of disagreement, play different roles at different stages of the process. We test our hypotheses with a proprietary database of 169 environmental, social, and governance engagements with US public companies over 2007–12. We find that while deliberative interaction does not help advance the engagement process, it positively moderates the effect of disagreement in the solution development stage. By contrast, in the solution implementation stage, deliberative interaction amplifies the negative effect of disagreement, thus hindering progress in the engagement. Our article contributes to shareholder engagement, deliberation theory, and interactionist organization theory by establishing that engagement effectiveness is an interactional achievement shaped by both deliberation and disagreement.

如何在股东参与中解决冲突与审议之间的紧张关系？我们通过将股东参与研究作为一个包含三个阶段的审议过程来解决这个问题：建立对话、解决方案开发和解决方案实施。我们推测两种互动机制，协商互动和表达不同意见，在过程的不同阶段扮演不同的角色。我们使用包含 2007-12 年间美国上市公司的 169 项环境、社会和治理活动的专有数据库来检验我们的假设。我们发现，虽然慎重的互动无助于推进参与过程，但它在解决方案开发阶段积极缓和分歧的影响。相比之下，在解决方案实施阶段，协商互动放大了分歧的负面影响，从而阻碍了参与的进展。我们的文章通过确立参与有效性是一种由商议和分歧共同塑造的互动成就，对股东参与、商议理论和互动主义组织理论做出了贡献。