Obtaining Entrepreneurial Skills, While Preserving Motivation: Quasi-Experiment of Social Enterprise Training Effects

Abstract

The increasing dependence on the private for-profit provision of social services worry both public service mangers and legislative bodies. While the former inquire what educational base can effectively assist public-service motivated entrepreneurial individuals to develop their aspirations further, the latter question whether a newly developed social enterprise form occurs due to imperfections of nonprofit legislature. To address these concerns, this article analyzes the data collected during a training program that helped individuals (N = 155) to launch social enterprise start-ups in a country, where a nonprofit tax-exempt option has not been yet developed on the national legislative level. Confirming several propositions of the economic and personal identity theories, this quasi-experiment reveals a mismatch between social orientation of the recruited participants and the objective to teach them business skills, suggesting that a nonprofit tax-exempt organizational form might have better supported their public service aspirations.

Keywords:

• Public service motivation
• status striving
• achievement striving
• psychological identity
• public policy

Disclosure statement

The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest that relate to the research, authorship, or publication of this article.

Notes

1 Belarus is a global South country, where the popularity of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has not reached the extent that it can influence consumers’ decisions. Like in many countries of global South, large corporations are publicly owned or controlled, mid-size business is non-existent, and small for-profits lack budget or the scales of operation to consider any CSR initiatives.

2 Skills improvement via training has been well studied for various organisational forms. We have not reviewed separate elements for the sake of space and because skills here are somewhat a background variable that serves as the settings to study whether or not the training affected motivation and psychological profiles.

3 For example, consider Self-Sacrifice dimension of PSM. The common logic suggests that one’s level of self-sacrifice is irrelevant to whether that person completed course Module#4 on "Advertisement", or dropped just after Module#3 “Cash Flow”. Yet, whether or not a person completed the entire training, as compared to only some insights, might determine how she feels about the idea of opening social enterprise and her ability to unquestionably devote herself to do so.

4 The researchers exclude the opportunity that no-results could have been contributed to the low quality/one-perspective bias of the training itself, and therefore, no skill improvements have been found. The training involved multiple actors from different countries: formal lectures with local and Dutch professors, and with the Belarusian coaches, who became successful entrepreneurs all over the Western world.