The Impact of Recruiting Women Entrepreneurs on Reducing Mission Drift

Social enterprises can often help address persistent problems in rural areas of emerging economies, such as unemployment, poverty, and lack of access to information and government programs. While many social enterprises have hybrid business models with a dual performance objective of increasing both social welfare and financial returns, often, these organizations end up compromising on the social purpose for financial gain in a phenomenon known as mission drift (Cornforth, 2014; Doherty, Haugh, & Lyon, 2014; Santos, Pache, & Birkholz, 2015). Mission drift can be perceived as a problem due to organizational identity and scaling issues (Chambers, 2014), collaborative goal congruence (Kwong, Tasavori, & Cheng, 2017), or meeting investors’ expectations (Cetindamar & Ozkazanc-Pan, 2017). We investigate mission drift occurring among microentrepreneurs affiliated with a social enterprise.