Social Innovation and Civil Society Organizations

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the influence of organizational pro-activeness, organizational risk-taking, and transformational leadership behaviors on social innovation outcomes. The specific aims, within this goal, of this study include the following: 1: Explore the influence of organizational pro-activeness on social innovation outputs - a. product/service, b. process/administrative- within CSOs. 2: Explore the influence of organizational risk-taking on social innovation outputs - a. product/service, b. process/administrative - within the CSOs. 3: Explore the influence of transformational leadership behaviors within CSOs on social innovation outputs - a. product/service, b. process/administrative – within the CSOs. Entrepreneurial Orientation Theory & Transformational Leadership Theory oriented this study and the hypothesis to test. This research is an exploratory-descriptive study using cross-sectional data collected from directors of CSOs in Mexico with a 37-item online survey cross-culturally adapted to the local context. Multiple statistical procedures were used to test the hypothesis, including bivariate robust correlation analysis and multiple and linear robust regression analysis. The sample size of the study is 139 directors of non-profit organizations from 25 different states of Mexico. Data was collected using convenience sampling.This study is relevant for multiple reasons, the primary being the following: 1) The results of this study may help CSOs identify what areas of organizations may need restructuring, improvement, or addition to generating innovations that could enhance program and service effectiveness and sustainability. 2) by providing knowledge about how to enhance the capacity of CSOs and involve their clients or beneficiaries (populations and groups in vulnerable or exclusion conditions) in innovation processes. 3) This study may contribute to the identification of critical components in the design of policies and programs aimed at strengthening CSOs innovation capacities and how to measure their results. 4) Finally, this study's results provide evidence on key variables to understand factors that enhance or limit organizational social innovation. In the context of the proposed study, to our knowledge, there is no readily available data from an extensive number of organizations to inform how CSOs are generating social innovation and with what intensity. Also, with the global socio-economic panorama in the last two years, innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, and the social performance of non-profit organizations have become subject to growing interest. This study has three main findings: Organizational proactiveness and risk-taking are significant predictors of social innovation outputs in non-profit organizations. On the other hand, transformational leadership was not a significant predictor of social innovation outputs. The primary contributions of this study are the generation of a baseline of the current situation regarding social innovation outputs generation among non-profit CSOs in Mexico. The study also contributes evidence on how social innovation can be promoted with organizational practices. It also contributes to the scholarly debate around leadership styles and their relationship to social innovation generation and CSOs better performance. This study explores social innovation in the non-profit field from an international context, specifically in Mexico, for a field mainly concentrated in the U.S. and West Europe. The study also informs some implications for practitioners, policy decisions, and scholarship regarding the need to assess how the notion of risk-taking and proactiveness permeated the CSOs and the non-profit sector.