Social enterprises (SE) are organizational forms aiming to achieve social goals through applying business strategies (Young, 2012). The encounter between social and business objectives is commonly addressed as an inherent conflict between two distinct paradigms. Each paradigm represents different logic; the business paradigm is derived from business profit, characterized by competitiveness, economic interests, and achievement values, and the social paradigm is striving for social impact, identified with creation of social justice, concern for others and the environment, and prosocial values. The leaders of the social enterprise phenomenon have varied professional backgrounds ranging between the business and the social worlds. Those leaders naturally carry their own set of values and perceptions into the organizational forms they create. Values are defined as principles, manifested cognitively, affectively and behaviorally (Rokeach, 1973). Underlying perceptions of the leaders and effect behaviors values play an important role in decision making both in the personal and organizational level (Russell, 2001).
The social enterprise field confronts its leaders with ethical dilemmas on a daily basis such as how to manage an organization with the double bottom line, promote social objectives and manage the organization's resources to make it sustainable. The literature on social enterprises has thus far focused on the conflict in both the institutional and strategic levels (e.g., Low, 2006; Bull, 2008; Smith, Gonin & Besharov, 2013). One of the issues yet to be explored is the conflict between the values and perceptions underlying those involved in this emerging field.
Two pretests were conducted to examine the underlying conflict assumption. In the first pretest the participants; entrepreneurs, investors, managers, board members and researchers, who attended an academic conference, were selected to represent different roles in the SE ecosystem. The participants were asked to reflect on the perceived relationship between social and business aspects, by relating to metaphors describing different kinds of relationship, such as synergy, conflict, completion and competition. The participants were guided to indicate to what extent they agree with the statement describing the relationship between the two fields. In the second pretest, students were asked to fill Schwartz’s value questionnaire (2012), in search for individuals that can contain the perceived conflict between prosocial and achievement values associated with the SE field, and can hold high levels of the opposite values at the same time.
The findings reveal an interesting pattern. The first pretest participants, were more likely to find the relationship between social and business aspects as completion or synergy than as conflict. At the same time students’ questionnaire analysis indicated that more than a quarter of the sample has marked both achievement and prosocial values as highly important.
Our findings suggest that there are individuals who perceive the relationship between the two fields as value creation rather than conflict, and that the conflicting values can be perceived as highly important at the same time.
In this paper, we wish to expand the SE discourse by offering the concept of Values' Ambidexterity to describe the unique value system characterizing leaders/potential participants in the SE field. Ambidexterity is a concept borrowed from biology, used to describe humans with equal control of both hands, without a clear preference for one of them. In the absence of a dominant orientation ambidextrous better use their brain, tend to greater creativity and have a wider range of actions (Barnett & Corballis, 2010). In line with the biological phenomenon we claim Values' Ambidexterity is an individual integrative thinking approach, which assigns equal weight for both social and business orientation to enable essential values from those worlds, to better respond to environmental complexity and to create novel and synergistic solutions.
3. Governance, employment and human resource management
