Governing For Impact and Performance Within Social Entrepreneurial Ventures

Bacq, Sophie [UCL] Janssen, Frank [UCL] Kickul, Jill

Social entrepreneurial ventures pursue a double bottom line, i.e., they try to achieve simultaneous social and financial performance. Governance has been shown to be a critical issue for firm performance. However, this issue has been neglected in the SE literature. This exploratory study empirically addresses this gap by proposing a mediational model between governance behaviors (agency and stewardship) and financial performance and social impact. Although showing mixed results about the mediation by organizational capabilities, this study shows that these are good predictors of both financial performance and social impact, and that agents’ opportunistic behaviors negatively influence the development of these organizational capabilities.