Leading Social Entrepreneurship Teams: Empowering Leadership and Dynamic Capabilities as Drivers of Creativity and Innovation

Social ventures operate at the intersection of business and social mission, facing competing institutional logics and scarce resources while striving to generate sustainable social impact. To navigate these challenges, leadership plays a crucial role in enabling team processes that foster creativity and innovation. Building on the resource-based view and the dynamic capabilities framework, this study examines how empowering leadership – characterised by delegation, autonomy and participative decision-making – enhances team creativity and innovation in social ventures. Specifically, we test a sequential mediation model in which empowering leadership influences team innovation through team dynamic capabilities and team creativity, controlling for servant leadership. Data were collected from social ventures operating in Brazil. Results indicate that empowering leadership positively affects team dynamic capabilities. The indirect effects of empowering leadership on both creativity and innovation were also significant. These findings highlight empowering leadership as a critical trigger of adaptive and creative team processes that sustain innovation in social ventures.