Effective Leadership in Social Businesses: An Integrative Framework Grounded on Experiences in Brazilian Social Ventures

Although scholars have argued that leadership is key to bring momentum to social ventures, little is known about specific leadership attributes that are necessary to foster stakeholder engagement and goal achievement in social enterprises. To fill this knowledge gap, we apply the grounded theory method to better understand effective leadership of social businesses. We uncover eight leader attributes that enabled effectiveness in this field. We clearly define and describe this parsimonious yet thorough set of attributes, highlighting their relevance vis-à-vis specific business challenges and suggesting that effective leadership in social businesses goes beyond the attributes covered by extant leadership perspectives.