Worker Involvement and Performance in Italian Social Enterprises: The Role of Motivations, Gender and Workload

Ermanno C. Tortia, Mónica Gago, Florence Degavre and Simone Poledrini
Additional contact information
Ermanno C. Tortia: Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento, 38122 Trento, Italy
Mónica Gago: Faculty of Business Studies, Mondragon University, 20560 Oñati, Spain
Florence Degavre: Centre de Recherche Travail, Etat et Société, Université Catholique de Louvain, 1348 Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Simone Poledrini: Department of Economics, University of Genoa, 16126 Genoa, Italy

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-20

Abstract: Over the past two decades, organizational sustainability has been studied from several different perspectives, such as marketing, governance, strategy, and human resource management (HRM). However, sustainability framed in HRM has not yet received enough attention in the literature, especially as it concerns the study of different organizational forms. Building on Enhert and Harry’s (2012) sustainable HRM approach, this article studies worker empowerment and how it affects organizational performance in terms of service quality and service innovation. Specifically, it addresses how relational motivations interact with HR-empowering practices (involvement in decisions and task autonomy) as organizational resources in influencing performance, how workload pressure resulting from HR empowerment can improve performance, and the influence of gender on performance, especially with concerns for human capital (tertiary education) and motivations. To this end, a representative sample of workers employed by Italian social enterprises (ES) in the social service sector is used. We propose multilevel SEMs that are based on two sets of equations specifying worker- and organization-level effects on organizational performance. Our main results show that the combination of worker engagement and an appropriate relational context in the organizational environment is most conducive to delivering better and innovative services. In addition, a higher percentage of well-trained and relationally motivated women employees helps achieve this goal.

Keywords: social enterprise; sustainable HRM; worker involvement; relational motivations; workload; service quality; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/2/1022/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/2/1022/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:2:p:1022-:d:726620

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().