Creating and Sustaining Stakeholder Emotional Resonance with Organizational Identity in Social Mission-Driven Organizations

How do senior managers of social mission-driven organizations build and sustain stakeholders' emotional resonance with organizational identity beliefs over time in the face of repeated existential threats?This is an important question, given the dependence of many such organizations on external stakeholders who provide the resources necessary for survival.In this paper, we investigate the case of Solidum, a philanthropic organization devoted to poverty causes.Drawing on ethnographic, interview and archival data over 20 years, we develop a process model showing how senior managers may create and sustain stakeholder emotional resonance through three practices of emotional resonance work: building emotional bridges, enrolling stakeholders in collective soul-searching and materializing an appealing identity symbol.We show that stakeholder emotional resonance needs to be continually renewed and reshaped in the face of ongoing challenges associated with macro-organizational trends and the routinization of existing practices that can result in the dissipation of emotional resonance over time.The paper contributes to the literature on organizational identity maintenance by drawing attention to the active managerial work required to sustain stakeholder emotional resonance over time to allow missiondriven organizations to survive and prosper.It is well known that social mission-driven organizations such as non-profits, cooperatives, social enterprises, and philanthropic organizations often experience tensions between the pursuit of their social mission and economic imperatives (Ashforth & Reingen, 2014;Jacobs, Kreutzer, & Vaara, 2020;Smith & Besharov, 2019), potentially leading to what has been known as 'mission drift,' (Ebrahim, Battilana, & Mair, 2014;Jones, 2007), i.e., the dilution of their 'raison-d'être' in order to respond to economic pressures.Perhaps ironically, critical to an organization's ability to sustain its social mission and core identity over the longer term is the ongoing commitment and engagement to that identity by key stakeholders (e.g., clients, funders, donors), on whom the organization also depends for financial resources.For example, Jacobs et al. ( 2020) reveal how a dominant managerial mindset at UNICEF that neglected the organization's children's advocacy mission ultimately led to accusations of financial mismanagement from whistleblowers, undermining donor trust and resulting in a financial crisis.Cloutier and Ravasi (2020) suggest that alignment between elements