Unintended Consequences of Scaling Social Impact Through Organizational Growth Strategy in Social Enterprises
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Authors
Islam, Syrus
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Item type
Journal Article
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Volume Title
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Abstract
Social enterprises are hybrid organizations aiming to achieve both financial sustainability and social impact. Because of their active role in creating social impact by addressing pressing social problems, they are recognized as important agents to help attain the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In the social enterprise context, organizational growth is considered a major strategy to scale social impact since it helps them offer more products/services to a larger number of beneficiaries. However, little is known about when and how this strategy may not work as intended. By synthesizing prior research and using real-life examples, this article presents ten conditions under which scaling social impact through an organizational growth strategy can create unintended consequences in social enterprises. The article also develops a holistic framework articulating how these ten conditions can emerge via seven growth-related activities in social enterprises. The developed framework facilitates a comprehensive understanding for managers and social entrepreneurs about the pitfalls to avoid while pursuing organizational growth as a social impact scaling strategy in social enterprises. Finally, this article introduces a diagnostic tool — ImpactProtect: A Growth Risk Assessment Tool for Social Enterprises — designed to help social enterprises evaluate their vulnerability to unintended consequences associated with organizational growth.Description
Keywords
1503 Business and Management, 1701 Psychology, Business & Management, 3505 Human resources and industrial relations, 3507 Strategy, management and organisational behaviour, 5201 Applied and developmental psychology, Social enterprise, Social impact, Organizational growth, Impact scaling strategy, Unintended consequence, Growth risk, Pitfall
Source
Organizational Dynamics, ISSN: 0090-2616 (Print), Elsevier BV, 101200-101200. doi: 10.1016/j.orgdyn.2025.101200
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© 2025 The Author. Published by Elsevier Inc. Creative Commons. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. You are not required to obtain permission to reuse this article.