Exploring Stewardship as an Antecedent Behavioural Trait of Social Entrepreneurs

Abstract

We explored stewardship behaviour as a possible antecedent to the activities of a social entrepreneur towards providing desired sustainable solutions. Extant literature posits that social entrepreneurs are predominantly guided in their sustainable solutions by ex-ante and ex-post resource positions. Resource availability guides the social entrepreneur’s behaviour which per se is not different from the behaviour of a profit-seeking entrepreneur. We contend that apart from resource considerations, stewardship is also an important behavioural consideration for social entrepreneurial activities. We used a single embedded inductive case study to establish the linkage between stewardship behaviour and social entrepreneur leading to desired sustainable solutions in the context of the health care sector in institutionally weak economies like India.