Performance of Hybrid Organisations. Challenges and Opportunities for Social and Commercial Enterprises

Abstract

Growth is a key dimension of organisational performance, and innovativeness has been identified as one of its most important predictors in commercial enterprises. But does this also hold for the growing number of social enterprises and so-called “hybrid” organisations? Whereas neo-institutional accounts emphasise the legitimacy premium and performance benefits that come with hybridity, category signaling approaches stress the downsides and negative performance effects of blurred categories. Introducing the neglected distinction between category hybridity and goal hybridity and adopting a multilevel perspective on hybrid organisations, the present study develops and empirically tests competing hypotheses with data from the 2009 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). Multilevel analysis of 2,606 social and 10,133 commercial enterprises, obtained from 150,721 respondents in 42 countries reveals a significant and positive association between organisation-level innovativeness and growth expectations for both commercial and social enterprises. The effect of organisational innovativeness on growth expectations is stronger positive for social compared to commercial enterprises, and higher levels of goal hybridity increase growth expectations for commercial, but not for social enterprises. No moderating effects of country-level differences were found.

Keywords:

• Cross-country study
• global entrepreneurship monitor
• innovativeness
• multilevel analysis
• organizational growth
• organizational legitimacy

Acknowledgments

We are thankful for the comments received during the 8th International Social Innovation Research Conference ISIC in Glasgow 2016 on the previous version of this paper and from the ICS colleagues (2014) and professors during the research training at the Universities of Groningen, Utrecht, and Nijmegen. This research started thanks to the support of the Europlata Erasmus Mundus mobility scholarship and later with the support of a doctoral grant from the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya). Rafael Wittek acknowledges funding from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) through its 2017 Gravitation Program [grant number 024.003.025]. Chaïm la Roi acknowledges funding from three research projects funded by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (FORTE) when preparing this manuscript: Grants 2012-1741, 2016-07099 and 2016-00678.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).