Collaboration in Purpose-driven Organizations

Abstract

Cooperation and coordination are two complementary aspects of collaboration that are essential for firms. As firms articulate a prosocial purpose and embed societal goals into their strategies, routines, and culture, new coordination challenges arise. In contrast, such challenges do not exist when firms only implement peripheral corporate social initiatives and did not need to extend their attention beyond cooperation, which relates to employees’ motivation. In this paper, we highlight that prosocial purpose-driven firms should not care about their employees’ prosociality, but they should also ensure that they manage to coordinate those employees. We found that legitimacy judgments mediate the positive impact of employees’ prosociality on the level of collaboration a firm reaches. We also found that this mediating effect is stronger for prosocial purpose-driven firms relative to non prosocial purpose-driven firms.