Organizational Hybridity And Mission Deviation In Social Enterprises

Social entrepreneurship,as a new form of entrepreneurship,takes social value as the primary goal and achieves it through commercial means.It has largely solved the sustainable development problems faced by today’s society,such as poverty,environmental pollution and resource shortages,and thus has made up for government failures,market failures,and charity failures to a certain extent.According to the latest data of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor(GEM),the global social entrepreneurship rate has increased from 2.8% in 2009 to 6.9% in 2015.In the trend of inclusive and sustainable development,social entrepreneurship has increasingly become one of the main ways to solve complex social problems,and therefore has become the frontier of cross-disciplinary research in strategic management,non-profit organization management,and social policy.Nonetheless,social enterprises combine core organizational elements which traditionally seem incompatible and form naturally-occurring hybridity.The hybridity of a social enterprise causes the governance complexity and organizational fragility,making it faces the risk of mission deviation,that is,the primary goal of social enterprises shifted from realizing social mission to maximizing economic benefits.Therefore,understanding what organizational hybridity consists of,how it affects the mission deviation of social enterprises,and where it comes from play a key role in the survival and development of social enterprises.This issue is also an important one in the field of organizational management.On the one hand,existing researches have generally accepted that commercialization is the main source of mission deviation,embodied in both the transformation from non-profit form to for-profit form and the process of organization expansion.These studies lacked the exploration on the cognitive level,still focused on the theoretical definition or phenomenon-driven issues,and rarely involved empirical studies.On the other hand,based on different theoretical perspectives such as organizational identity theory,institutional logic perspective,and paradox theory,scholars have studied how to manage the hybridity of social enterprises in terms of human resource management,organizational structure design,internal governance mechanism,and stakeholder interaction.These studies have ignored the internal heterogeneity of social enterprises,lacked a comprehensive perspective as well as a systematic discussion on both antecedents and outcomes of organizational hybridity.They have also paid too much attention to the conflicts between the contradictory elements that constitute the hybridity and the undesirable consequences caused by the conflicts.To fill the gap of existing research,my dissertation systematically and comprehensively explored the relationship between organizational hybridity and the mission deviation of social enterprises from Configuration Perspective and Yin-Yang Balance View,and tried to answer the following questions in Chinese context.First,how to avoid mission deviation by combining different dimensions of the hybridity of social enterprises? Second,how does the organizational culture hybridity affect mission deviation,and what are the boundaries conditions? Third,what are the factors at the institutional and individual levels that affect different dimensions of the hybridity of social enterprises?Accordingly,my dissertation used the data of 2017 and 2019 special survey on Chinese social enterprises,the second-hand data and interview data of two social enterprises.my dissertation adopted a mixed research design that combined multiple research methods such as the fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis(fsQCA),case study and regression analysis.By the combination of both qualitative and quantitative research methods,my dissertation made a thorough and comprehensive exploration of the above problems.The research conclusions of my dissertation are as follows:First,based on four internal dimensions of organizational hybridity(organizational activities,workforce composition,organizational design,and organizational culture)and one external dimensions of organizational hybridity(inter organizational relationships),my dissertation identified two basic models to avoid mission deviation,the "hybrid-design-led" model and the "multiple-relationship-driven" model.The configuration under the "hybrid-design-led" model emphasizes the importance of the internal governance design of the organization,that is,in the case of a relatively single workforce composition,social enterprises can effectively avoid mission deviation by constructing a hybrid organizational design.The configuration under the "multiple-relationship-driven" model emphasizes the importance of multiple relationships outside the organization,but the hybrid culture needs to be cultivated within the social enterprise.My dissertation also identified two basic models of social enterprises that cannot avoid mission deviations,namely the "single constraint" model and the "mismatch failure" model,and discovered the substitute relationship between the internal and external organizational hybridity.Second,the hybridity of organizational culture significantly suppresses the occurrence of mission deviation in Chinese social enterprises.This effect is moderated by the completeness of governance structure and the differentiation degree of business models.As the increase in the completeness of governance structure,the above effect will be strengthened.As the differentiation degree of the business model increases,the above effect will be weakened.This conclusion is still valid in the robustness test of replacing independent variables and dependent variables.The business-dominated culture increases the possibility of mission deviation,as well as negatively influences the success of social enterprises;The non-profit-dominated culture has no significant effect on mission deviation and success.In contrast,the balanced culture has a significant inhibitory effect on mission deviation,and the organizational culture hybridity significantly increases the likelihood of success in social enterprises.Third,by exploring antecedents of different dimensions of organizational hybridity,respectively,my dissertation found that the "hybrid-design-led" model is more suitable for social enterprises established in areas where there is no relevant legislation of social enterprises and with a strong Taoist atmosphere."Multiple-relationship-driven" model is more suitable for social enterprises established in areas with a low level of marketization and high level of cultural tightness,or social enterprises led by entrepreneurs with both social and commercial work experience.The main research contributions of my dissertation lie in:First,my dissertation expands the existing research on organizational hybridity and hybrid organizations.Based on Configuration Perspective,using the fsQCA,my dissertation has identified that the "hybrid-design-led" model and the "multiple-relationship-driven" model,two basic models that can effectively avoid mission deviation,as well as the "single constraint" model and the "mismatch failure" model,two basic models that fail to mission deviation.Research results show that social enterprises can achieve better development by strategically configuring the different dimensions and degree of internal and external organizational hybridity,that is,social enterprises can maintain hybridity in some dimensions while maintaining oneness in other dimensions to form different models and avoid mission deviation.My dissertation shifts from "holographic hybridity" to "ideographic hybridity",and extends from the surface question of "whether to hybrid" to the in-depth thinking about "how to hybrid" and "how much to hybrid".It also responded to social entrepreneurship scholars’ call of research on "the heterogeneity of hybrid organizations"(Battilana and Lee,2014),"the degree of hybridity"(Shepherd,Williams,Zhao,2019)and "discussing hybridity issues from a configuration perspective"(Pache and Santos,2013).Second,my dissertation enriches the research on social enterprise governance,especially on mission deviation.First,based on previous studies on mission drift,my dissertation puts forward the concept of mission deviation,and clarifies the connections and differences between mission deviation and mission drift;Second,the research on organizational culture hybridity and mission deviation enriches related studies from the organizational cognition level.Mission deviation is a unique governance issue in social enterprises.Most existing studies on the antecedents of mission deviation focused on organizational behavior or characteristics.As the basic and stable principle of an organization,organizational culture contains the organization’s moral code,core values,the basis of decision-making and behavior and other key contents.Based on it,my dissertation proposed that organizational culture hybridity could inhibit mission deviation through "fix" in motivation and "change" in action.It thus promotes the current research on antecedents of mission deviation from superficial behaviors to organizational cognition.Third,my dissertation reveals the boundary conditions of the above effect in terms of organizational characteristics(i.e.,the completeness of governance structure and the differentiation degree of business models).It contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between organizational culture and mission deviation,and increases the applicability of the research.Third,my dissertation expands the application of Yin-Yang Balance View to the new field of organization management as well as enriches the indigenous research on social entrepreneurship.The Eastern Yin-Yang management philosophy remained unexplored in the field of social entrepreneurship,which is inherently paradoxical.Based on the view of Yin-Yang Balance,my dissertation proposed the inhibition mechanism of organizational culture hybridity on mission deviation of social enterprises,revealing the huge potential of Eastern management philosophy in the emerging field of social entrepreneurship.In my dissertation,the dialogue and integration of different theoretical perspectives between the East and the West in the context of social entrepreneurship add nuance to the indigenous research on social entrepreneurship and responses to the call of domestic scholars.(Fu,Si,and Chen Hui,2017).Fourth,the empirical research results based on survey data have make up for the slow development and small numbers of quantitative research on social entrepreneurship in recent years(Liu and Zhuang,2018).In addition,the governance issues of social enterprises are well-known for their complexity and multifacticity.My dissertation innovatively introduced the fsQCA to explore the interaction between different dimensions of organizational hybridity,and the complex,asymmetric,equivalent paths between their combinations and the mission deviation in social enterprises.Plus that fsQCA combines the focality of qualitative research and the generality of quantitative research(Misangyi et al.,2017),it has provided an effective research tool and an integrated theoretical perspective to fully understand how to avoid mission deviation.It also responds to the continuous call of scholars on social entrepreneurship to do more quantitative studies(Short et al.,2009)as well as the use of multiple methods to explore the organizational hybridity issues in the social entrepreneurship context(Battilana et al.,2017).My dissertation also has the following limitations:First is the limitation of cross-sectional data.Although my dissertation combined the survey data in 2017 and 2019 to conduct fsQCA,as well as conducted interviews and case studies on two social enterprises,the exploration of the relationship between organizational culture hybridity and mission deviation and the antecedents of organizational hybridity were based on cross-sectional data,which may cause concerns about reverse causality(Estrin et al.,2016).It is not conducive to discussing dynamic issues,either.Future research can continue to study in the dynamic process of social enterprise governance by panel data or qualitative research.Second is the limitation of the measurement.Both the social and economic performance in my dissertation are based on the subjective measurement,and thus may cause bias.The measurement of social performance has not yet formed a unified standard,scholars can also conduct more in-depth discussions in the research involving social entrepreneurial performance in the future.Third,the discussion of still moderating effect of organizational governance in my dissertation only considered the completeness of the governance structure,unconsidered the role of governance structure features may play.Future research can further explore how the governance structure’s size,composition,and daily activities affect decision-making and mission deviation in social enterprises.Finally,there are still deficiencies in the discussion of hybridity.Although my dissertation has considered the dimensions and degree of hybridity,it still has a long way to go in the future.For example,as organizations continue to grow,how will social enterprises adjust their hybridity? In China,government participation is a major feature of social enterprises.So whether social enterprises in China are not only combine the logics of business and social welfare,but also need to consider the government logic.