How Positive Relationships at Work Stimulate the Innovation - Orientation of Social Enterprises and for - Profit Organizations

The aim of the paper is to investigate how innovation-orientation is determined by positive relationships at work (PRW) both in social enterprises and businesses. Our interest on the former is inspired by the role they perform in tackling social problems in the modern economy. Lessons learnt from business may help to improve their performance. Moreover, due to a different nature of social enterprises we want to show that the process is different in social enterprises and businesses as PRW context is different in those organizations. We used a questionnaire-based Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) on the sample of 200 Polish business organizations and 140 social economy enterprises. For the data analyses we applied descriptive statistics, the factor analysis and the hierarchical clustering with Ward’s method. The research proved that teams characterized with positive employee relationships are more innovation-oriented both in business and social enterprises, however, PRW have different attributes in social enterprises than in businesses. The most innovation-oriented teams in social enterprises are rather autocratically governed while in business the innovation-orientation is supported by the small power distance.