The Impact Of Public Service Motivation On Social Enterprise Performance

As a result of China’s rapidly developing economy and society,social problems continue to emerge,such as employment difficulties for people with disabilities,environmental pollution,and an aging population.These problems have taken on new features of complexity and diversification.Relying on the traditional solutions of the government and the third sector is no longer able to effectively deal with these problems.Social enterprises play an important role in solving social problems,breaking welfare deadlock and promoting sustainable social development.Hence,how to improve social enterprise performance has received attention from academia.Public service motivation,as an intrinsic drive for social entrepreneurs to develop social enterprises,has an important impact on the strategic choice and future development of social enterprises.However,studies on how individual entrepreneurial characteristics affect social enterprise performance only focus on entrepreneurship,passion and entrepreneur experience.The existing studies ignore the public service motivation which is the unique characteristic of social entrepreneurs.Based on the upper echelons theory,this study explores the relationship between public service motivation of social entrepreneurs and social enterprise performance.This study analyzes the impact and mechanism of public service motivation on social enterprise performance,including the mediating role of business model innovation and the moderating role of environmental dynamism.This study takes Chinese social enterprises as the research object,conducts a questionnaire survey on the directors of 198 social enterprises,and uses software such as SPSS and AMOS to test the hypotheses.The empirical results show that:public service motivation has a positive effect on social enterprise performance.Novelty-centered business model innovation plays a mediating role between public service motivation and social enterprise performance.Efficiency-centered business model innovation mediates the relationship between public service motivation and economic performance of social enterprises.Environmental dynamism positively moderates the relationship between public service motivation and efficiency-centered business model innovation.Environmental dynamism significantly moderates the relationships between public service motivation and novelty-centered business model innovation.This study extends and enriches the existing results on the factors influencing social enterprise performance,reveals how public service motivation affects social enterprise performance,and clarifies the boundary conditions for public service motivation to influence the two types of business model innovation.Drawing on the findings of the research,this study advances management suggestions for social entrepreneurs and the government from three perspectives:improving social entrepreneurs’ public service motivation,taking the initiative to innovate the business model and paying attention to the changes in the external environment.