Sustaining Institutional Values in Social Enterprises through Mentoring Practice

Abstract

Social enterprises attempt to solve important societal problems. To realize these purposes, they need to infuse institutional values and facilitate learning among members. One way to do so is through the practice of mentoring. The purpose of this study is twofold: to examine (1) the effects of mentoring on performance of mentors and (2) potential difference in such effects between face-to-face and e-mentoring. We develop theory that suggests mentoring can help mentors internalize the institutional values and facilitate their learning and social capital development. Our theory also suggests such beneficial effects can be weaker for e-mentoring due to lack of physical proximity to mentees and formal authority. We test our theory through a natural experiment that happened in a social enterprise in India, where senior entrepreneurs were asked to mentor newcomers in face-to-face manner in randomly sampled regions. The enterprise also created a distinct group of e-mentors. We hypothesize both face-to-face and e-mentoring have the effects of improving the mentors’ performance on a parameter monitored by the enterprise, but they differ in their effects on another performance parameter not monitored yet closer to its core institutional values. We test our hypotheses using difference-in-difference estimation, and our findings provide general support.