European Social Enterprises, Still an Epitome of Benevolent Enterprises? The Employees’ Perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a comparative study in terms of two ethical climate dimensions and affective organizational commitment. The employees of a confederation of social enterprises and a socially sustainable firm participated in the study. The multi-group exploratory factor approach was used to analyse the data. The findings of the study suggest that differences that exist in self-interest and social responsibility climates are not clear when comparing social enterprises and sustainable firms. Furthermore, the results showed that the size of the effect of these two types of ethical climates on affective organizational commitment varies from one type of organization to the other.

KEYWORDS:

• Social enterprises
• for-profit socially oriented enterprises
• self-interest climate
• benevolent cosmopolitan climate
• affective commitment
• organizational ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.