组织理念混合性对社会企业使命偏离的影响:基于阴阳平衡观的视角

The impact of organizational concept hybridity on mission deviation in social enterprises: Based on the view of Yin-Yang balance

现有基于西方视角的社会企业研究普遍将社会和经济双重目标看作二律背反的悖论,强调二者的冲突性,忽略了可能的协同作用,不仅造成研究路径的多重分化,也直接导致现实中社会企业合法性获得的困难。为弥补上述不足,本文基于东方阴阳平衡观,利用2017年中国社会企业专项调查的数据,探讨了组织理念混合性对于使命偏离的影响,实证结果表明:(1)组织理念混合性能够显著抑制社会企业使命偏离的发生;(2)治理结构完备性和商业模式分化程度分别加强和减弱了上述关系。本文试图在中西方研究视角比较与对话中揭示东方管理哲学在社会创业领域的巨大潜力,是社会创业本土化研究的尝试,拓展了阴阳平衡观在新的组织管理领域的应用,丰富了社会企业治理的相关研究。

Mission deviation refers to a situation in which the economic performance of a social enterprise is outstanding while the social performance is not ideal. Exploring the antecedents of mission deviation has become a key issue for the survival and development of social enterprises. There are three gaps in existing research. First, existing research generally focuses on the impact of specific organizational behaviors on mission deviation, which is to a great extent driven by phenomenon and lack further analysis on deeper factors behind behaviors. More importantly, the existing social enterprise research based on the Western Aristotelian paradigm generally regards the coexistence of social welfare and business logics in social enterprises as the two extremes of paradox and emphasizes the contradiction between them. Therefore, it is believed that mission deviation is an inevitable organizational dilemma in the development process of social enterprises, but it ignores the possibility of “blending” and “balance” between them as well as their synergy effect. Finally, the governance issues of mission deviation are strongly linked to its characteristics. However, existing research generally regards social enterprise as an emerging organization category of the same type that is different from commercial enterprises or non-profit organizations, which ignores its heterogeneity. Few researches have explored the boundary conditions of mission deviation from the perspective of organizational characteristics, leading to the reduction of the effectiveness of the research.To fill these research gaps, based on the view of Yin-Yang balance, this paper studies the impact of organizational concept hybridity on mission deviation in Chinese social enterprises. The combination of different degrees of nonprofit and business concept in social enterprises constitutes the organizational concept hybridity. The increase in the hybridity means that the degree of relevance and intensity of non-profit and business concept increases accordingly. In addition, the role that organizational concept plays in mission deviation is inseparable from the organization′s own characteristics. Therefore, this paper further investigates the possible moderating role that the completeness of governance structure and the differentiation degree of the business model plays between the relationship of organizational concept hybridity and mission deviation.This paper empirically tested the above content using Logit regression model. The cross-sectional data was derived from 2017 special survey of Chinese social enterprises that was initiated by the China Research Center for Social Entrepreneurship and China Social Enterprise Service Center. After the data were cleaned and screened, the final sample included 205 Chinese social enterprises. This paper also conducted a robustness test by changing the measurement methods of independent and dependent variables. In the further analysis part, this paper compared the different effects of the business-dominated concept, non-profit-dominated concept, balanced concept, and organizational concept hybridity on the mission deviation and success of social enterprises.The results of this paper show that:(1) organizational concept hybridity significantly suppresses the occurrence of mission deviation in Chinese social enterprises. This effect is moderated by the completeness of the governance structure and the differentiation degree of the business model. As the governance structure gets more complete, the above effect will be strengthened. As the business model gets more differentiated, the above effect will be weakened.(2) The business-dominated concept increases the possibility of mission deviation, as well as negatively influences the success of social enterprises. The non-profit-dominated concept has no significant effect on the mission deviation and success of social enterprises. In contrast, the balanced concept has a significant inhibitory effect on mission deviation, and organizational concept hybridity significantly increases the likelihood of success in social enterprises. Therefore, in terms of the argument of whether the organizational concept hybridity has a more positive impact on the social enterprise′s balanced governance and even performance improvement, what the paper concluded from the theoretical argument and empirical results is positive.The theoretical contributions of this paper mainly lie in three aspects. First, this paper expands the application of Yin-Yang balance to the new field of organization and management, reveals the great potential of Eastern management philosophy in social entrepreneurship research as well as enriches the indigenous research on social entrepreneurship. Second, this paper extends the existing research on social enterprise governance, especially on mission deviation. It empirically verifies that the substantial cause of mission deviation lies in the organizational concept, which is an ideological factor that provides guidelines for managers′ decision-making as well as employees′ behaviors. It achieves new breakthroughs in research on antecedents of mission deviation from behavior to cognition level. Third, this paper reveals the contextual factors that influence the relationship between organizational concept hybridity and mission deviation in terms of organizational characteristics, making up for the inadequate exploration of this issue in the past.