Identificación de los elementos organizativos clave en el desempeño de las empresas sociales. El caso de los telecentros en Latinoamérica

Social enterprise is an organizational model based on the sale of products and services to achieve a social mission. Social enterprises are characterized by two elements: first, it pursues a social mission, defined by a societal problem or an environmental challenge. Second, it is uses a market-based approach consisting on the sale of goods and/or services. It represents an interesting alternative for projects aiming to provide access to basic goods and services as it relies on a self-generated income formula and a flexible model which supports economic and social sustainability.  The goal of this article is to analyze the main organizational elements of a sample of telecentres and to explore whether a relationship can be identified between some of the elements and the organization performance. A better knowledge in these issues can help existing organizations improve its sustainability and the design of social enterprises. This article draws on a previous organizational model for the analysis of social enterprises developed at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. The model consists of 8 elements divided into 3 different categories: those referring to the goals of the initiative (what is to be done), those describing the people working on the initiative (stakeholders) and those related to the operational elements. The empirical study has been carried out within Telecentre.org, an international foundation that supports the establishment and sustainability of grassroots level telecentres. These entities provide access to communication and information services for economic, social and cultural development in local communities. The study consist of a 36-item questionnaire designed and developed by the authors to capture the perceptions of telecentre managers on the most relevant organizational aspects of their organizations, and on four dimensions of the telecentre performance: social, economic, customer satisfaction and employees and volunteer satisfaction. A factor analysis transformation is done to summarize the information contained in the 36 items of the questionnaire. Then, correlation studies and regressions were carried out to identify the relations among the different variables. The results show that the global performance is highly correlated with seven of the elements of the organizational analysis model used. Organizational culture emerges as an element that explains a big part of the global performance, the customer satisfaction and the employees/volunteer satisfaction. Key words : social enterprise, performance, telecentre, key factors.