How Social Enterprises Facilitate Employee Creativity: A Grounded Theory Approach

Employee creativity is an important source of organizational innovation and competitive advantage. The adoption of creative ideas in social enterprises, a type of hybrid organization, has become significantly beneficial and even imperative for solving problems in changing societies. However, the process of enhancing employees’ creativity in hybrid organizations remains relatively unexplored. Therefore, this research seeks to demonstrate the employee creativity facilitation mechanism in social enterprises. Taking a qualitative approach using grounding theory, this paper proposes a framework indicating the key elements (restriction, inspiration, incubation, and implementation) involved in social enterprises’ facilitation of employee creativity. Based on interviews with 35 people in 10 social enterprises, our framework reveals a process of employee creativity facilitation consisting of inspiration, incubation, and implementation, and we identify several specific features of hybrid organizations that facilitate employee creativity.