The Paradox of Organizing Prosocial Market Based Opportunities.

Although prosocial interfaces establish boundaries that bring insiders together to jointly define an organization's mission, organizing these interfaces can also create paradoxes. Prior research on prosocial organizing draw on institutional or paradox theories to explain social and economic tensions of organizing entrepreneurial activities that impact the welfare of community stakeholders at the firm level. This paper extends prior studies with a unique examination of another paradox that is embedded within broader conversation that currently dominates the social entrepreneurship literature. Specifically, we draw attention to the sensemaking of market-based prosocial opportunities that are mission centric but have different attributes of risk, uncertainty and ambiguity by the leaders of social enterprises. Using data we collected from an experimental vignette study of 195 real world CEO leaders of social enterprises, we find that the leaders with prior entrepreneurial experiences had less aversion to exploiting prosocial market based opportunities with ambiguous market risks. We also find that the leaders of social enterprises, irrespective of prior entrepreneurial experience, prioritize the safeguarding of organization resources and exhibit loss aversion when their strategic goal is to expand the mission impact. Our findings demonstrate the value of entrepreneur specific human capital in prosocial organizing and similar to traditional corporate venturing, suggests that the strategic goals of social enterprises may take precedence over achieving financial returns. In other words, trading off mission impact for financial returns from market based prosocial opportunities may not make sense to CEO leaders of social enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]