The effect of leadership styles, social capital, and entrepreneurial orientation on organizational effectiveness of social welfare organizations in Malaysia

This study provided a rare opportunity to thoroughly discuss the hampered effectiveness of the Social Welfare Organizations in Malaysia. In line with the above, this study aimed to examine the effect of leadership styles, social capital and entrepreneurial orientation on organizational effectiveness of the Social Welfare Organizations. In this quantitative research, simple random sampling was adopted as the sampling technique to draw conclusions about the entire population. Usable responses were received from 134 Social Welfare Organizations, which accounted to a 56.07% response rate. A combination of IBM SPSS statistical software version 22.0 (SPSS) and the Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used as the statistical tools to analyse the collected data. Drawing upon the Resource-Based View Theory, the results indicated that the seven main hypotheses (both the direct and mediating hypotheses) were supported, whereas only eight out of fifteen sub-hypotheses were supported. In brief, the findings demonstrated the positive impact of leadership styles, social capital and entrepreneurial orientation on the organizational effectiveness of the Social Welfare Organizations in Malaysia. Also, this research provided evidence that entrepreneurial orientation had a full mediating effect on the relationship between leadership style and organizational effectiveness, while there was partial mediating effect on the relationship between social capital and organizational effectiveness. Correspondingly, Social Welfare Organizations should be encouraged to adopt those practices to enhance the effectiveness of their organizations. Further, the implications, limitations and suggestions of the study were discussed. It was also suggested that the policy-makers should focus on creating awareness regarding the importance of the social aspects and provide supportive national policies which could enhance the organizational effectiveness of Social Welfare Organizations.