Pursuing B Corp Certification: Exploring Firms’ Entrepreneurial Orientation and Prosocial Motivation
In this study, the authors, including Jeffery Pollack PhD, an NC State associate professor, examine the Entrepreneurial Orientation of firms pursuing B Corp Certification and how it changes throughout and the first 8 weeks of the pursuit compared to firms not seeking B Corp Certification. “Our work is motivated by the empirical finding that Benefit corporations (B corps) that pursue certification experience a short-term slowdown in financial performance”. The authors analyze why firms pursuing B Corp Certification have a lower Entrepreneurial Orientation throughout the 8 week study period than firms not seeking certification, and discuss Prosocial Motivation as a potential factor. “…findings show that firms pursuing B corp certification, at the study launch, demonstrated lower EO, and that the EO gap between the two types of companies remained throughout the study. We found this curious, and we thus examined our data for possible explanations with regard to prosocial motivation”.
The authors of the study include:
Jeffery M. Pollack
Rosanna Garcia
Timothy L. Michaelis
Shelia Hanson
John C. Carr
Lewis Sheats
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