Responsible Leadership in Social Enterprise Development: Organizational and Ecosystem Factors

Abstract

Responsible leadership in social enterprises requires managers to reconcile financial sustainability with employee well-being, service quality, stakeholder responsibility, and continuity of the social mission under limited resources and fragmented external support. Existing research has examined hybrid organizing, social enterprise financing, impact measurement, and entrepreneurial ecosystems but provides limited evidence on how these constraints interact in managerial practice across organizational and ecosystem levels. This study aims to identify the development challenges perceived by social enterprise managers and determine how they are associated with organizational continuity, service quality, employee well-being, innovation, partnership sustainability, and long-term social impact. The empirical material comprises semi-structured interviews with managers of twelve social enterprise organizations purposively selected to represent different activity fields and contexts. Qualitative content analysis involved identification of meaning units, condensation, coding, development of subcategories, cross-category comparison, and synthesis into five analytical categories; a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats synthesis distinguished internal capacities from external ecosystem conditions. The analysis identified five interconnected challenge domains: funding and investment; human resources and organizational capacity; sociocultural acceptance and communication of social value; accessibility of public services and infrastructure; and strategic and social impact management, partnerships, and community engagement. Funding instability was associated with shorter planning horizons, difficulties in retaining specialists, maintaining relationships with service users, investing in infrastructure and innovation, and allocating resources to social impact assessment, revealing a reciprocal relationship in which limited impact-measurement capacity may weaken organizations’ ability to demonstrate outcomes and secure further funding. Human-resource shortages, the multifunctionality of small teams, and dependence on individual managers increased workloads, emotional strain, burnout risks, and vulnerability to loss of organizational knowledge; weakly institutionalized partnerships further intensified dependence on personal networks. Gaps in healthcare, social services, infrastructure, and methodological support transferred brokerage and coordination functions to social enterprises, while stigmatization and weak recognition of social value increased communication burdens and constrained participation and external support. The findings indicate that sustainable social enterprise development depends on institutionalized organizational knowledge and partnerships, employee support, proportionate social impact assessment, diversified longer-term financing, accessible public services, and coordinated responsibility across the social enterprise ecosystem.