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 mission-driven organizations to survive and prosper.