Mission alignment with employees and financiers: Probing into the workings of B Corp certification

Abstract

Sustainable enterprises are becoming more popular and play an important role in tackling environmental and social challenges. Their hybrid nature, that is, the combination of financial and societal goals, makes them prone to external legitimacy issues and competing internal logics, which results in mission drift. We investigate whether and how B Corp certification helps remedy mission drift by conducting semi-structured interviews with 16 key employees in 13 Dutch and Belgian certified B Corps from various industries. Our findings show that B Corp certification helps ingrain the mission into human resource management, in both the recruitment and employee engagement processes, which contributes to internal alignment and lowers the risk of mission drift. In addition, certification helps articulate the company's dual nature to finance providers and find financing sources that relate more with the mission.