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Journal of Business Ethics (2020) 166:627–641 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04140-9

O R I G I N A L PA P E R

Vulnerable Workers’ Employability Competences: The Role of Establishing Clear Expectations, Developmental Inducements, and Social Organizational Goals

Mieke Audenaert2  · Beatrice Van der Heijden1,2,3,4,5 · Neil Conway6 · Saskia Crucke2 · Adelien Decramer2

Received: 2 May 2018 / Accepted: 28 February 2019 / Published online: 11 March 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract Using an ethical approach to the study of employability, we question the mainstream approach to career self-direction. We focus on a specific category of employees that has been neglected in past research, namely vulnerable workers who have been unemployed for several years and who have faced multiple psychosocial problems. Building on the Ability-Motivation- Opportunity model, we examine how establishing clear expectations, developmental inducements, and social organizational goals can foster employability competences of vulnerable workers. Our study took place in the particularly relevant context of social enterprises, which have a primary goal to enhance the employability competences of vulnerable workers. Multi- level analysis of data from 38 CEOs of social enterprises, 121 leaders and 594 workers, demonstrated that establishing clear expectations and developmental inducements enable vulnerable workers to anticipate and optimize their employability com- petences. Furthermore, a positive association was found between establishing clear expectations and the balance dimension of employability, yet only in social enterprises that prioritize social organizational goals, suggesting the need to recognize the extent organizational goals shape opportunities for vulnerable workers. Establishing clear expectations and developmental inducements can therefore enhance vulnerable workers’ employability competences in supportive contexts; however, there may be detrimental side effects to drifting away from social organizational goals.

Keywords Employability competences · Vulnerable workers · AMO model · Establishing clear expectations · Developmental inducements · Social organizational goals

Vulnerable workers make part of the broad group of employed people often entering the workforce following long-term unemployment. Besides having a history of years of unemployment, vulnerable workers also typically have limited educational attainment and multiple interdependent psychosocial issues (Battilana et al. 2015), such as (a his- tory of) drug abuse, homelessness, debts, generation pov- erty, imprisonment, or mental and physical health problems. Because of their specific mix of life circumstances, these workers risk permanent exclusion from the labour market which makes them vulnerable. This exclusion is problem- atic. Vulnerable workers have a lower level of human capi- tal due to their low education attainment in their childhood and adolescent years, and have a shortage of training and

development in their adult years due to long-term unem- ployment. Participation in lifelong learning is marked by a Matthew effect: persons that already have a high level of human capital will increase their human capital even fur- ther through lifelong learning (Boeren 2009). This results in ‘a gap between persons with a high level of human capital and persons with a low level of human capital’ (Knipprath and De Rick 2015, p. 51). Moreover, economic inequality issues are often tied up in a vicious cycle of psychosocial issues of human capital, mental health, well-being, and poverty (Neckerman and Torche 2007). Thus, vulnerable workers’ human capital gap is linked to greater economic inequality, with its concomitant negative consequences for learning outcomes and well-being (Wilkinson and Pickett 2017). Learning outcomes and well-being are both essential for employability, namely the acquisition and fulfilment of employment and, if necessary, the creating of work (Van der Heijden 2000), which is in turn essential to labour mar- ket prospects (De Vos et al. 2011; Van der Heijden et al.

* Mieke Audenaert [email protected]

Extended author information available on the last page of the article

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2018). Hence, vulnerable workers are in a vicious cycle that undermines their future employability. Despite the evident social and economic need to better understand vulnerable workers’ employability, it is striking that there is hardly any research on this category of employees, who are unable to rely on themselves for fostering their employability (Bal and Dóci 2018).

Existing research on employability is linked to a discourse about employability ‘that emphasizes individual rather than societal or organizational responsibility’ (Roper et al. 2010, p. 673). As a consequence, employability research is charac- terized by a clear shortage on studies about vulnerable work- ers (Ashley and Empson 2013), and contextual determinants such as organizational practices that foster the employees’ career (De Vos and Cambré 2017). Organizational practices may be of particular relevance to foster the employability of vulnerable workers in social enterprises. These organiza- tions have the potential to address complex social issues by combining the resources of a traditional business model with a social mission (Ramus and Vaccaro 2017).

There are different kinds of social enterprises (Defourny and Nyssen 2016), among which this study considers Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISE; hereafter referred to as social enterprises). These social enterprises are particu- larly suitable to study the employability of vulnerable work- ers because the latter are employed as the core work staff in such enterprises, instead of employing staff that should be predominantly aimed towards competing in the mar- ket. This implies that the organizational practices in social enterprises can serve their social mission by fostering these vulnerable workers’ employability (Crucke and Knockaert 2016). Therefore, these organizations have ‘potential as key drivers of equitable and socially-inclusive economic growth’ (GECES 2016, p. 7). However, while striving for financial sustainability, social enterprises may find themselves in a situation of mission drift from social goals to economic goals, thereby threatening their commitment to the social goals (Pache and Santos 2013; Ramus and Vaccaro 2017).

This study aims to examine whether and how organiza- tional practices in social enterprises can enhance vulnerable workers’ employability. Building on the Ability-Motivation- Opportunity (AMO) model (Delery 1998), we investigate how establishing clear expectations, developmental induce- ments and social organizational goals can foster employ- ability competences of vulnerable workers by conducting a multilevel analysis of data from 38 CEOs of social enter- prises, 121 leaders and 594 workers.

We contribute to the literature in at least two ways. First, we extend the scope of employability research from high potentials (Inkson et al. 2012), and, more recently, disabled workers (Baldridge and Kulkarni 2017) and minorities (Wyatt and Silvester 2015), to also incorporate vulnerable workers, which is a currently understudied group. While disabled

workers and minorities face challenges, which are specific to their disability or social category, to find jobs and progress careers, vulnerable workers face multiple and intersecting psychosocial issues. Therefore, they are characterized by hav- ing lower employability competences, a larger distance to the labour market, and greater problems with finding and keeping employment. By studying vulnerable employees, we address the critique on the careers literature and wider discourse which privileges individuals relying on career self-direction (Inkson et al. 2012), and respond to calls for management scholars to engage in the inequality debate (Beal and Astakhova 2017). Organizations in general and social enterprises in particular can apply practices that ‘disrupt the vicious cycles in which economic inequality is embedded’ (Riaz 2015, p. 1090) by fostering their vulnerable workers’ employability. Second, AMO theory claims that employees’ (i) ability to perform, (ii) motivation to perform, and (iii) opportunities to perform foster favourable human capital and motivational outcomes. We aim to extend AMO theory by positing that opportunity- related organizational practices can affect the ethical approach to HR practices that aim to foster employees’ ability and moti- vation to perform. Our line of reasoning is built upon link- ing the AMO model to the ethical perspective on HRM and the recent debate on mission drift in social enterprises. More specifically, the interactive perspective of the AMO model (Delery 1998; Siemsen et al. 2008) is linked to the ethical perspective on HRM which fosters ‘an understanding of HRM as embedded into its socio-political context’ and which ‘is a moral activity (with potential to enhance quality of life)’ that can entail potential ‘divergent interests between employer and employee’ (Greenwood 2013, pp. 361, 359). In terms of these divergent interests, social organizational goals can be specifi- cally relevant to social enterprises as the mission drift from social to economic organizational goals may be detrimental to vulnerable workers’ interests (Doherty et al. 2014; Ebrahim et al. 2014), as a result of market mechanisms that can weaken social enterprises’ ethical decision-making (Chell et al. 2016). The paper contributes by studying how potential mission drift of opportunity-related organizational practices (here: social organizational goals) function as the context in which ability (here: clear expectations) and motivation (here: developmental inducements) are embedded. By studying the potential detri- mental effects of mission drift for vulnerable workers, we also add to recent debates on mission drift in social enterprises (Ramus and Vaccaro 2017).

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Theoretical Framework and Hypotheses

The Ethics of Employability in Mainstream Labour Markets

In general, employability research is framed in HRM lit- erature that utilizes a ‘unitarist frame of reference’, and thus supports a ‘shareholder-centred view of managerial responsibility while avoiding the discomfort of believing that doing so requires managers to treat employees instru- mentally’. Obviously, this has ‘significant implications for the moral treatment of employees’ (Greenwood and Van Buren 2017, p. 675). Accordingly, research on employabil- ity carries implicit understandings of the individual work- er’s responsibility to find and keep a job in the mainstream labour market. These implicit understandings downplay the responsibility of organizations to enhance workers’ employability (Bal and Dóci 2018). Accordingly, today’s dominant employment relationship entails less invest- ments in employees than before (Audenaert et al. 2018). Employees are treated as free agents in the employment relationship, which is referred to as boundaryless careers (Arthur and Rousseau 1996). However, risk is shifted from employers to employees. This makes maintenance of employability obligations ‘a minimal ethical requirement of organizations seeking to use the boundary career model as an employment practice’ (Van Buren 2003, p. 136). In contrast with this dominant discourse, there is a neces- sity to study employability as an ethical responsibility of employers to employees as well. Employers also have a responsibility in maintaining their workers’ employability in the external labour market. When employers do not take this responsibility, this is likely to be ‘harmful for workers whose skills are fungible’ (Van Buren 2003, p. 134).

Employability Competences of Vulnerable Workers

While previous studies have often focused on occupa- tional expertise and personal flexibility (e.g. De Cuyper et al. 2008; De Vos et al. 2011), we focused on two other employability competences.

First, in todays’ turbulent work environment, employees need to ‘take it upon themselves to acquire new skills and knowledge (build their human capital)’ (Smith 2010, p. 288). Therefore, we focused on the extent to which vul- nerable workers can anticipate and optimize their com- petences. Anticipating and optimizing competences is defined as ‘preparing for future work changes in a personal and creative manner in order to strive for the best possible job and career outcomes’ (Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden 2006, p. 454), and has proven to be crucial for

obtaining beneficial results in different work environments (see Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden 2006; Van der Heijden et al. 2009b). Anticipating and optimizing com- petences are an important aspect of vulnerable workers’ employability because being up-to-date in domain-specific knowledge and skills is inevitable to keeping one’s job or, if necessary, finding a new job (Sanders and De Grip 2004). However, due to multiple years of unemployment and a low socioeconomic standing in society, vulnerable workers have a significant deficit in their anticipating and optimizing competences (Battilana and Lee 2014).

Second, success in one’s career is not only restricted to developing domain-specific competences, but also ‘a result of the balance between cognition and emotion’ (Van der Hei- jde and Van der Heijden 2006, p. 452). We focused on the extent to which vulnerable workers gain balance in different and often opposing interests. Gaining balance is defined as ‘compromising between opposing employers’ interests as well as one’s own opposing work, career, and private inter- ests (employee) and between employers’ and employees’ interests (Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden 2006, pp. 455–456). The emphasis on potential divergent interests, using an ethical perspective, makes it particularly relevant to study gaining balance as an outcome variable, because gaining balance pertains to divergent interests between the employer and the employee (i.e. economic versus career interests) (Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden 2006). This may explain why less research interest has been devoted to gaining balance in the mainstream HRM perspective which assumes overlapping interests between both parties (i.e. employer and employee). Two divergent interests pertain- ing to gaining balance are particularly salient for vulnerable workers. First, the vulnerable worker’s current activities in the economic interests of the social enterprise may com- pete with their future career interests. In order to achieve the economic goals, social enterprises may structure work pro- cesses in small parts in order to make the tasks achievable for vulnerable workers which is crucial at the start of their employment. Some social enterprises may be tempted to keep structuring work in small parts because, as the worker becomes more experienced, it fosters the speed of their per- formance, which is in the economic interests of the social enterprise. Under these circumstances, vulnerable workers can function in the protected realm of the social enterprise, but are not working towards their future career interests. A second salient balance issue for vulnerable workers per- tains to their own interest in striking a balance between their private life and their working life. Many vulnerable work- ers face multiple psychosocial problems due to a history of long-term unemployment, which are not erased upon finding a job (Drake and Bond 2008). Whereas for many employees it is their work life that interferes with their private life, for vulnerable workers it is often the other way around: their

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psychosocially demanding private life interferes with their potential to find and maintain a job.

AMO Model and Employability Competences

Running against the grain of an ethical approach to HRM (Wiley 2000) which would assume a more plural- ist approach, earlier scholarly work on the AMO model is mainly grounded in a mainstream, utilitarian perspective of HRM (Greenwood 2013). AMO theory claims that organi- zational practices and management activities can enhance employees’ human capital and motivation in order to achieve favourable organizational outcomes by enhancing employ- ees’ (i) ability to perform, (ii) motivation to perform, and (iii) opportunities to perform (Appelbaum 2000). HRM prac- tices can be clustered to support employee abilities, motiva- tion, and opportunities to perform, which affect employee outcomes such as job performance. In turn, these employee outcomes affect the organization’s performance. The ability dimension has a stronger relationship with human capital, while the other two dimensions have a stronger relationship with motivation (Jiang et al. 2012).

The AMO model is usually (but not always) theorized starting from HRM practices such as selection, development, and performance management (Ehrnrooth and Björkman 2012). In accordance with the need to situate our model in the specific context of our study (Johns 2006), we select AMO variables that are specifically relevant for vulnerable workers, and argue that the management activities of estab- lishing clear expectations and developmental inducements enable and motivate vulnerable workers to enhance their employability competences, particularly in opportune con- texts where social enterprises focus on social organizational goals (see Fig. 1). Even though social enterprises have social goals that map onto the employees’ interests in accordance with a pluralist approach (Greenwood and Van Buren 2017), the duality of social organizational goals besides economic goals potentially generates mission drift for social enter- prises (Ramus and Vaccaro 2017).

Consistent with the interactive perspective of the AMO model (Delery 1998; Siemsen et  al. 2008), we approach employability from a novel multilevel perspective where (1) social organizational goals represent the context that is supportive of vulnerable workers’ opportunities which are

Fig. 1 Model of how social enterprises can foster vulner- able workers’ employability competences

Social enterprise’s context

Establish clear

Expectations

(Ability) Balance

Anticipate and optimize

competences

Developmental

inducements

(Motivation)

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Leader’s HRM practices

Vulnerable employee’s

employability competences

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formulated at the organizational level, (2) managerial and organizational practices that affect motivation and ability are overseen by team leaders, and (3) employees report affec- tive states.

We examine the management activities of establishing clear expectations and offering developmental inducements as enhancing vulnerable workers’ motivation and ability to perform employability competences, and social organi- zational goals as a context supporting vulnerable workers’ opportunities. We chose these particular activities because they fit the social enterprise context while also capturing the essence of the AMO model. First, the management activity of establishing clear expectations relates to organizational practices such as employee performance management and job analysis in order to structure work into feasible parts, and lead to employee outcomes of motivation and enhanced efficacy (i.e. ability). Second, the practice of developmental inducements relates to coaching, training, and career devel- opment, which enables and motivates vulnerable workers to face their (future) work challenges. A meta-analysis of the AMO model supports our approach of viewing management activities (such as establishing clear expectations and devel- opmental inducements) as affecting multiple components of this model (e.g. motivation and ability), and where such activities are supported by multiple organizational practices (e.g. performance management) (Jiang et al. 2012).

Anticipating and Optimizing Competences

In current labour markets, employees have to enact their job and careers, owing to the increasing complexity of work and the difficulty to predict future work content (Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden 2006; Van der Heijden and De Vos 2015). Both proactivity, reflected in anticipating com- petences needed in the (near) future, and active adaptation, reflected in optimizing one’s competences, conceptually underpin the construct of employability (Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden 2006; Fugate et al. 2004), and are required for meeting prospective labour market demands and protect- ing one’s sustainable employability.

According to the AMO model, some organizational practices can foster employees’ ability and motivation to engage in certain behaviours (Appelbaum 2000). We expect that leaders in social enterprises can enable and motivate vulnerable workers to anticipate and optimize their competences by establishing clear expectations which encompass explicitly set, detailed, and clear work goals (Merchant 1985). Whereas such work goals work against the grain of most job design theory recommenda- tions that encourage high levels of job autonomy (Parker et al. 2001), vulnerable employees are likely to welcome such explicitly set and detailed work goals. Under self- determination theory (Deci and Ryan 2000), vulnerable

workers—having experienced multiple failures in the past—are likely to have frustrated competence needs. When work goals are detailed and explicitly set, vulner- able workers that face a skill gap for the regular labour market can be enabled to meet expectations. Their work goals provide vulnerable workers with small success expe- riences which help them fulfil basic competence needs.

Research supports that clear expectations are specifi- cally crucial for vulnerable workers’ employability out- comes (e.g. Feather 1992; Vansteenkiste et al. 2005). In particular, clear expectations are crucial for this category of workers in order to build their self-efficacy (Vansteen- kiste et al. 2005), linked to their basic need to experience competence (Deci and Ryan 2000). The AMO model, which draws on expectancy theory (Vroom 1964), pre- dicts that vulnerable workers will anticipate and optimize their competences more intensively when their leader fos- ters clear expectations. Consistent with self-determination theory and expectancy theory, clear expectations about required behaviour support employee motivation to engage in the behaviour, assuming that the goal is set at an obtain- able level. Establishing clear expectations assists vulner- able workers in becoming fully aware about what is needed to fulfil certain in-role task performances, increasing their ability and motivation to perform, and enabling them to successfully anticipate and optimize the required behav- iour and competences.

Hypothesis 1a Establishing clear expectations is positively related to vulnerable workers’ anticipation and optimization of competences.

Developmental inducements entail a supporting and rewarding approach (Jia et al. 2014). By stressing the impor- tance of self-development and skill utilization through offer- ing developmental inducements, organizations stimulate and reward competency development that can enable and motivate employees to behave proactively and to engage in future developmental behaviours (Caesens and Stinglhamber 2014). As such, developmental inducements foster employ- ees to anticipate and optimize their competences, adding to their employability (De Vos et al. 2011; Sanders and De Grip 2004; Van der Heijden et al. 2009a; Veld et al. 2015). Furthermore, empirical findings support that competency development foster the employability of low-skilled employ- ees (Sanders and De Grip 2004) and welfare clients (Deckop et al. 2006), and confirm a significant association between formal job-related learning and anticipating and optimizing competences (Van der Heijden et al. 2009a).

Hypothesis 1b Developmental inducements are positively related to vulnerable workers’ anticipation and optimization of competences.

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The Moderating Role of Social Organizational Goals

Some organizations offer employees more opportunities in the work environment to exercise discretionary effort (Appelbaum 2000). These opportunities provide the nec- essary support that enables action (Blumberg and Pringle 1982; Boxall and Purcell 2003; Delery and Roumpi 2017). Building on the interactive perspective of the AMO model (Delery 1998; Siemsen et al. 2008), we expect that social organizational goals provide opportunities for vulnerable workers to foster employability competences from clear expectations and developmental inducements. Establishing clear expectations and developmental inducements will be more opportune for vulnerable workers’ employability com- petences when social enterprises emphasize social organi- zational goals.

Social enterprises are ‘hybrid organizations’ (Doherty et al. 2014) and although they are set up to realize the social goal of the professional and social integration of vulnerable people, they operate in a commercial context. As a conse- quence, they also have to fulfil the expectations of customers and investors. Because of this dual mission, social enter- prises face trade-offs when allocating resources to social activities, such as counselling, versus commercial activi- ties (Battilana et al. 2015). Although social enterprises are organizations that ‘primarily pursue a social mission while also engaging in commercial activities to sustain their operations through sales of products and/or services’ (Bat- tilana et al. 2015, p. 1658), social value creation may be compromised for capturing economic value (Ebrahim et al. 2014). Social enterprises are prone to mission drift where market performance goals ‘threaten their commitment to the accomplishment of their social mission’ (Ramus and Vaccaro 2017, p. 308). In that case employing vulnerable workers will be less linked to normative values, that ben- efiting society by employing these people and developing their employability is the right thing to do, yet, rather more to instrumental values, that the social aims are used as an instrument to bolster organizational success (Walker et al. 2017). Rather than leading to mutual gains, lower emphasis on social organizational goals may generate outcomes that are appropriate from a unitarist perspective, but not from a normative, pluralistic perspective of HRM (Greenwood and Van Buren 2017).

When social enterprises place lower emphasis on social organizational goals, establishing clear expectations and developmental inducements do not provide the same oppor- tunities to employees to engage in discretionary efforts to anticipate and optimize their competences. We therefore hypothesize:

Hypothesis 2 A focus on social organizational goals moder- ates the relationship between establishing clear expectations

(2a) and development inducements (2b), and vulnerable workers’ anticipation and optimization of competences, such that this relationship is stronger when there is a higher focus on social organizational goals.

As mentioned earlier, gaining balance pertains to one’s own divergent interests (i.e. work–life balance) and the divergent interests between the employer and the employee (i.e. economic versus career interests). In other words, it is about feeling more control over (possibly conflicting) demands in one’s work life and protecting one’s work–life balance (Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden 2006).

In the context of a lower emphasis on social organiza- tional goals, establishing clear expectations and develop- mental inducements will have a lesser effect on employees achieving balance in their work and family life. Even where expectations are clear, employees will be pressured to per- form more and to reach higher (i.e. less achievable) goals. In this context, developmental inducements may be demo- tivating rather than motivating because the emphasis is on high performance from vulnerable workers rather than com- petence development, and so employee development is less valued or overly geared towards performance imperatives. A main focus on short-term profit maximization and work intensification has indeed been found to hinder employee well-being (Kroon et al. 2009; Van de Voorde et al. 2012). Accordingly, this may threaten one’s opportunities to find balance. We thus hypothesize:

Hypothesis 2 Social organizational goals moderate the rela- tionship between establishing clear expectations (2c) and developmental inducements (2d), and vulnerable workers’ balance, such that this relationship is stronger when there is a higher focus on social organizational goals.

Method

Research Setting in Flanders

The recruitment procedure, as imposed and controlled by the Flemish government, requires that candidates for vulnerable worker positions must meet the following conditions: having low education attainment (no high-school degree), having more than 5 years of uninterrupted unemployment, and fac- ing psychosocial limitations and difficulties. Work integra- tion social enterprises in Flanders are private, risk-taking organizations that are supported by government subsidies, and are operating within highly competitive markets, such as packaging, assembling, gardening, and recycling (Crucke and Knockaert 2016). As an ultimate goal, the Flemish gov- ernment wants vulnerable workers to be integrated into the mainstream labour market (De Cuyper et al. 2015).

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Although social enterprises are by definition focused primarily