Could there be a reason that HR policies implemented by a social enterprise and meant to cultivate mission identification actually negatively impacted retention rates?

Ying Chen, Assistant Professor of Management at the URI College of Business and colleagues set out to explore this puzzling observation in their paper Attuned HRM Systems for Social Enterprises

Published in the Journal of Business Ethics, the paper is motivated by an observation made when conducting a case study where the HR practices of ProCredit (PC), a well-known social bank that this social enterprise (SE) adopted to cultivate mission identification were unfavorably impacting its retention rate.

Building on prior research and analysis of the case, the authors argue the need for Social Enterprises to embrace Human Resource Management (HRM) practices that are both mission-identification proactive and employee-retention preemptive. It theorizes that these HRM systems should be attuned to the labor market conditions (e.g., market segmentation and competition for employees) that frame how Social Enterprises develop and sustain Person-Organization (P-O) fit.

The paper suggests that attuned HRM systems are adapted to labor market conditions and tuned to support Social Enterprises’ adeptness to operate against the grain of country and industry norms.

 

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