A fatigue model of social venturing

Social entrepreneurs strive to alleviate the suffering of people in need (targets). However, helping others may also cause social-venturing fatigue—mental or physical exhaustion that severely diminishes engagement in social-venturing activities. Understanding the development and outcomes of social-venturing fatigue is important because it can harm both the social entrepreneur’s well-being and the venture’s targets. Therefore, this paper develops a fatigue model of social venturing in which an entrepreneur’s prosocial motivation drives his or her social-venturing effort. This effort can create benefits for targets but also generate social-venturing fatigue in the entrepreneur. Social-venturing fatigue triggers the entrepreneur’s detachment from the targets and desensitization to their social problems, diminishes the entrepreneur’s prosocial motivation for the targets, and/or leads the entrepreneur to exit social-venturing altogether. The entrepreneur’s psychosocial resources, the salience of the targets’ benefits, and the targets’ feedback about progress in solving their problems moderate the impact of social-venturing effort in generating the entrepreneur’s fatigue. Therefore, we provide new insights into (1) the antecedents and consequences of social-venturing fatigue; (2) why some social entrepreneurs start strong but their efforts diminish over time; and (3) how social venturing can help entrepreneurs build resources that protect them from fatigue.