Determinants that Enhance Resilience and Performance of Social Enterprises in Malaysia: A Conceptual Framework

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Social enterprise movement has emerged as a forceful social innovation paths to eliminate or address social problems. Aligned with the 11th Malaysia Plan and Transformasi Nasional 2050, Malaysia is committed to building a sustainable and equitable people-centric economy. To achieve the goal, the Malaysian government had set up Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Social Entrepreneurship (MaGIC) Unit in 2013, to propel the social enterprise sector and bring significant societal well-being to the disadvantaged groups. However, it is still at the nascent stage. As most of the social enterprises in Malaysia are still confronted with critical survival and performance challenges, it has become imperative for these entities to formulate strategies to enhance their resilience and performance. Hence, the main research objective is to examine the role of internal capabilities (i.e., management vulnerabilities and situation awareness) and external capabilities (i.e., training and financial support) influencing social enterprise performance in Malaysia. A mediating variable adaptive capacity was adopted to reflect the relationship between the predictors and the level of resilience of social enterprises in Malaysia. Due to the borderless nature of challenges and fluctuating environmental and unpredictable market condition, this research focuses on how Malaysian social enterprises would be able to adapt to the turbulence condition by resilience build, from the lens of Resource Dependence Theory and Resource Based View Theory. This study will employ a quantitative analysis to establish an explanatory model and more comprehensive understanding of this emerging field. The findings would advise the social enterprise's practitioners on their organisation’s strategic direction and offer a guiding model to the social enterprise investors, policymakers and future researchers.