Personal Wellbeing of Participants of Social Purpose Enterprises: The Influence of Social Support

Abstract This paper examines the effects of practical and emotional social support to changes in personal and vocational wellbeing of employees and training participants of social purpose enterprises. This study finds that among participants with lower baseline optimism and self-esteem, those who found the practical social support from their organization to be more relevant to their work outcomes had significantly higher optimism and self-esteem at the time of the survey, compared to other low baseline participants who had assigned less importance to their work-centred practical support. Social support did not influence those with high baseline scores in optimism and self-esteem, or changes to self-efficacy and vocational identity. Implications on support intervention within social purpose enterprises and for the broader field of social enterprise research are discussed.