Social Entrepreneurial Orientation And Its Formation Mechanism: The Perspective Of Organizational Change

Social entrepreneurship emerges to be a globally persuasive managerial philosophy recently,which focuses on creating social value through market mechanism.This perspective is not only highly compatible with the idea of sustainable development,but also with the strategy of building a harmonious society. Based on a systematic review of prior studies,this dissertation focused on the theories of organizational social change and social embeddedness.Adopting the scripts analysis framework provided by the structuration theory,this study closely examined the phenomenon of corporate social entrepreneurship(CSE).Three issues have been well resolved:(1) it developed the construct of social entrepreneurial orientation (SEO),specified and refined the concept of CSE(study 1 and 2);(2) it investigated the precipitating dynamics of CSE,clarified the formation mechanism of SEO(study 3 and 4);(3) it examined the results and outcomes of CSE,built the effectiveness mechanism of SEO(study 5).Thus the empirical part of this study is composed by 5 closely interdependent studies.Study 1 developed the construct of SEO by using the method of exploratory case study.It drew upon studies of entrepreneurial orientation,and examined the social entrepreneurial activities of three cases.Through both within-case and cross-case analysis,it extracted several theoretically meaningful dimensions for the construct. The result shows that social entrepreneurial orientation is a construct composed by three interrelated dimensions,namely social anticipating,reciprocal synergy,and resources expansion.This result provided necessary theoretical support for later quantitative research,and laid the basis for further spread of the idea of social entrepreneurship.Study 2 verified the construct of SEO and developed a scale for it.Author developed the original items by referring to both the results of prior studies and the field in-depth interviews.Experts were consulted to examine the wording and contents of the items.During the process of scale refinement,item analysis and exploratory factor analysis were employed in a sample of 130 firms,and the final scale included 11 items with three interrelated dimensions.Another independent sample of 117 finns was used to examine the psychometric properties of the scale. Using the technique of structure equation modeling,author found evidences of its internal consistency,individual item reliability,composite reliability,convergent validity and discriminant validity.Finally,correlation analysis provided evidence for the criteria-related validity.These results provided supports for the scale's validity and reliability,laid the basis for empirical measurement in the field of SEO research.Study 3 closely examined the precipitating dynamics of SEO.According to the theoretical results of organizational social change,author defined these dynamics into three categories,namely sustaining growth,alliance development and social commitment.Focus groups were employed to obtain social entrepreneurs' articulation about the precipitating dynamics of SEO.Content analysis was employed for coding the discussion materials.The result shows that sustaining growth is the most important one that drives CSE,while social commitment alone is not sufficient to drive it.However,CSE activities driven by social commitment are likely to be significantly different from their prior business.And in most conditions,when corporate face severe threats,the likelihood to conduct social entrepreneurship,which usually bears the potential to serve as the best option for them to rebound,are rare.Study 4 systematically examined the formation mechanism of SEO by using a sample of 208 groups.This study is composed by two parts.Firstly,author employed multiple regression and structure equation modeling to investigate the relationship between precipitating dynamics mentioned above and SEO dimensions.The result shows that the sustaining growth positively influences all three dimensions of SEO, while social commitment only influences social anticipating dimension directly. Secondly,three different kinds of organizational identity orientation were introduced into the model to reflect the enable dynamics of SEO.The result shows that the individualistic identity orientation negatively moderates the relationship between sustaining growth and SEO,while relational identity orientation positively moderates the relationship between alliance development and reciprocal synergy,and collectivistic identity orientation positively moderates the relationship between social commitment and social anticipating.Study 5 explained the effectiveness mechanism of SEO.Drawing on stakeholder theories,this study simulated real situations,in which the experimental factors were assigned with different levels.Under these scenarios,the subjects were playing different kinds of stakeholders.In order to understand the influence of SEO on stakeholders' perception,and the role of corporate social performance,multivariate variance analysis and multiple regressions were employed.The results from a sample of 120 groups showed that,SEO do positively affects corporates' stakeholder influence capacity,and corporate social performance mediates the relationship above. At the dimensional level,resources expansion and reciprocal synergy positively affect stakeholders' cooperative intention and relational commitment,while social anticipating just positively affects stakeholders' altruistic attribution,which simultaneously moderates the relationship between the other two dimensions of SEO and stakeholder influence capacity.Finally,the main conclusions of this dissertation were summarized.The theoretical contribution and practical implications,as well as the limitations of studies above and the directions for further research were discussed.