Do social enterprises attract workers who are more pro-socially motivated than their counterparts in for-profit organizations to perform low-skilled jobs?

Abstract

The literature highlights that social enterprises (SEs) attract workers who are motivated to help others and to meet the social aims in which they believe. However, this assumption is challenged in the case of low-skilled jobs. Therefore, we have performed an empirical study in the quasi-market of service vouchers in Belgium to know if SEs attract workers who have a different motivational profile than their counterparts in for-profit organizations (FPOs) to perform low skilled jobs (N = 217). No significant differences were found. Next, we have compared FPOs with two types of social enterprises, Home Care Services Organizations (HCSOs) and Work Integration Social enterprises (WISEs), and again no significant differences were found for the whole sample. However, it seems that a selection effect exists in WISEs when the sample is reduced to people who were not previously unemployed. In others words, when WISEs deviate from their initial mission of ‘hiring the most vulnerable people on the labor market’, it is only to hire workers whose are highly motivated to achieve the organization’s mission and who fit with the values defended by the organization.

Keywords:

• Social enterprises
• motivation
• recruitment
• low-skilled jobs
• value congruence

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our ARC and CIRTES colleagues for their helpful comments on this manuscript.

Notes

1. The concepts used to describe organizations with a social mission vary from one country to another: économie sociale et solidaire in France; économie sociale and entreprise à profit social in Belgium; ‘non-profit sector’ in the US, ‘voluntary sector’ in the UK, etc. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon tradition, most social scientists who are rooted in the European tradition consider the ‘third sector’ to include not only non-profit organizations (associations) but also cooperatives, mutual societies, foundations and even new forms of social enterprises or, in other words, all organizations whose primary purpose is not profit maximization for shareholders. Given that the purpose of this thesis is not to discuss the underlying issues with these different concepts, we made the choice to use the generic term ‘social enterprise’. For this research, we then define social enterprise as not-for-profit organizations that combine an entrepreneurial dynamic to provide goods or services with the primacy of their social aims.

2. Pro-social motivation is based on altruistic values (e.g. Meglino & Korsgaard, 2004; Penner, Midili, & Kegelmeyer, 1997) like empathy and helpfulness (Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin, & Schroeder, 2005), values of concern for others (e.g. Grant, 2007; Meglino & Korsgaard, 2004) and fairness (e.g. Lyons, Higgins, & Duxbury, 2010). In the SE context, De Cooman et al. (2011) confirm in a study of 13 service Belgian organizations that SE workers are more concerned about altruism than FPO workers.

3. Value congruence or the similarity between values of workers and the values of organizations refers to the concept of person-organization fit (e.g. Edwards & Cable, 2009).