Volunteer Retention in Prosocial Venturing: The Role of Emotional Connectivity

Abstract

This study develops an understanding of the role of emotional connectivity for volunteer retention in prosocial business venturing. By embedding it in organizational ambivalence theory, our analysis of four volunteer-dependent community ventures reveals two mechanisms through which entrepreneurs strengthen volunteers' emotional connectivity. We first identify emotion-focused practices that form volunteers' emotional attachment to the venture, and then demonstrate how duality-focused practices, in the form of managing inherent organizational duality, complement emotion-focused practices to foster volunteers' emotional loyalty to the venture. Theorizing from our findings, we introduce a model of managing volunteers' emotional connectivity, and conclude by discussing its implications for prosocial venture research on volunteerism and affective commitment.

The buzz before business: a design science study of a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem

“…This view resembles the general turn in entrepreneurship research to view sustainability as purposefully contributing to societal well-being and environmental regeneration, while being financially sound (e.g., Binder and Belz, 2017;Muñoz and Cohen 2018;Shepherd 2015). To ascertain a prolonged, purposedriven collaboration between actors bound together neither by contracts nor necessity, a positive emotional atmosphere is beneficial (Farny et al 2018). We find that the emotional climate enabler represents a foundational support that allows participants in the community to work within this strong, shared intention in order to combine their creative freedom and generate new venture ideas in a flat and open community that encourages cellular working.…”

“…From a social constructionist perspective (Fletcher 2006), all knowledge is constructed as the result of an interaction process that has been designed and deliberately initiated. Instead of seeing this as an unwanted deviation from the ideal of the neutral and unobtrusive scientist, we can see it as a contribution to both theory-building and practice (Gummesson 1988). Applying design principles, research processes are designed as mutual learning processes, an opportunity for practitioners and researchers to reflect and co-construct their identities (Lundin and Wirdenius 1990).…”

“…In this last case, SEE is understood as a long-term entrepreneurial ecosystem and is not directly related to sustainable entrepreneurship. A recent literature review (Bischoff and Volkmann 2018) highlights the importance of connecting sustainable entrepreneurship with its prominent process view (e.g., Belz and Binder 2017;Farny et al 2018;Munoz and Cohen, 2018), which has been absent in the original definition as "an interconnected group of actors in a local geographic community committed to sustainable development through the support and facilitation of new sustainable ventures" (Cohen 2006, p. 3).…”

“…Nevertheless, we initiated the systematic data analysis only after all interventions were complete. It was in this way that we were able to follow standard procedures for inductive-abductive theory-building research in our process of abstracting theoretical ideas from the data by recursively going back and forth between data and emergent theoretical accounts (Farny et al 2018;Gioia et al 2013;Strauss and Corbin 1998).…”

“…In the interest of developing the SEE concept, we suggest more strongly integrating the process understanding of the literature on entrepreneurship (Davidsson 2015;Dimov 2018;McMullen and Dimov 2013) and sustainable entrepreneurship (Belz and Binder 2017;Farny et al 2018;Muñoz and Cohen 2018). For instance, the emergent process view of entrepreneurship emphasizes how ideas are converted into tangible ventures (Dimov 2007;Lichtenstein and Kurjanowicz 2010), predominantly featuring the discovery or creation of entrepreneurial opportunities (Venkataraman 1997).…”