# Value-Based Governance as a Performance Element in Social and Solidarity Economy Organizations: A French Sustainable Post-Modern Proposal

Arnaud Lacan

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Arnaud Lacan. Value-Based Governance as a Performance Element in Social and Solidarity Economy Organizations: A French Sustainable Post-Modern Proposal. Sustainability, 2022, 14 (4), pp.2153. 10.3390/su14042153. [hal-03620280](https://wwwHAL.fr/hal-03620280)

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# Value-Based Governance as a Performance Element in Social and Solidarity Economy Organizations: A French Sustainable Post-Modern Proposal

Arnaud Lacan <fnref n="1" />,<fnref n="2" /> ID

**Abstract:** This article offers a general reflection on governance and managerial practices within a Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) and suggests that in a time of profound socioeconomic change, it is in SSE companies' interest to establish global sustainable governance and responsible team management systems consistent with both the values structuring this domain as well as employee aspirations. This a French point of view with a sustainable dimension based on a literature review and on several published studies but not on an empirical approach. In a way it is an essay more than a demonstration. It is a proposal which could lead to methodological work. Here is a first step.

**Keywords:** governance; management; SE; values; staff; sustainability

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**Citation:** Lacan, A. Value-Based Governance as a Performance Element in Social and Solidarity Economy Organizations: A French Sustainable Post-Modern Proposal. *Sustainability* **2022**, *14*, 2153. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14042153

Academic Editors: Ioannis Nikolaou and Mark Anthony Camilleri

Received: 21 December 2021

Accepted: 3 February 2022

Published: 14 February 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
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## 1. Introduction

The social and solidarity economy (SSE) concept refers to enterprises, organizations, and innovations that combine production of goods, services, and knowledge with achieving economic and social goals as well as solidarity building [1]. The SSE should not be considered in isolation from the political and sustainable project that it seeks to advance. The sector continues to be driven by its seminal values of solidarity and collective interest in a Corporate Social Responsibility perspective, defined as a business model in which companies make a concerted effort to operate in ways that enhance rather than degrade society and the environment [2–4], despite the ever-increasing economic tensions and challenges with which it must contend. Its constituent organizations are structured via a French legal framework promoting the idea that activities’ implementation must incorporate this sense of collective interest [5] and the concern for sustainability [6]. Whether actors are involved with non-profits, cooperatives, or mutual societies, fully understanding SSE means remembering that they are necessarily anchored in a world of meaning, exemplified by the real possibility that in the future, it is companies’ social aims that might very become their actual purpose [7]. Recent studies strengthen the proposition by indicating this trend not only in France but elsewhere too [8–10]. The French point of view, here, is thought-provoking because, in the field of social and solidarity economy, the situation in France is enlightening. Indeed, the emergence of SSE organizations is ancient (the Middle Ages) but their political and juridical recognition is rather recent (the end of the 19th century for the juridical approach and the end of the 20th century for the political approach). So we still need to observe and analyze the French evolution of the social and solidarity economy toward a CSR perspective through its value-based governance, as in many others places in the world.

Rather than holding an individualistic, rational, and selfish worldview revolving around individuals, the idea here is to move to a more humanistic and fraternal approach focused on persons. Between Hayek's so-called "liberal" view that "not all human existences have a moral right to preservation" [11] and Fourier's social promise "to measure

<footnote n="1">¹ Sustainability Excellence Center, KEDGE Business School, 13009 Marseille, France;
arnaud.lacan@kedgebs.com; Tel.: +33-(0)491-82-73-50 or +33-(0)695-14-67-01</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Aix Marseille School of Economics, Aix Marseille University, 13205 Marseille, France</footnote>
a society's degree of civilization by the way it treats the poorest" [12], SSE organizations are committed to improving the life chances for its most disadvantaged and vulnerable citizens. It is therefore unsurprising to find that efforts to promote France's PACTE Act's "mission-driven corporate status" proposal have been led by SSE companies [13]. It is also unsurprising to feel the influence of CSR and the need for sustainability and the will to apply its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), because these three areas are closely linked. Indeed, the SDGs are a kind of a concrete proposal in order to realize the CSR principles (founded on the social, economic, and ecological pillars of sustainable development) clearly in the spirit of the SSE companies [14].

Against this background, SSE organizations' governance has become a real strategic issue [15]. Although such governance, in the strictest sense of the term, covers a wide array of legal, regulatory, or practical provisions delineating the powers and responsibilities held by the persons accountable for a company's long-term fortunes [16], the present paper will attempt to extend the scope of this concept to highlight further responsibility aspects. The idea here is that governance reveals the authenticity and topicality of a company's original project and should, therefore, also account for the way frontline teams respond to the main managerial guidelines they have been given. This involves both stakeholder oversight of structures and managing the people who work there, thereby bringing into the equation the intra-organizational human relations, the ones for which the direct line managers are responsible [17]. One question then becomes how crucial governance, construed in its aforementioned broader sense, is to the determination of collective performance in the non-profit sector [18] and in a sustainable perspective, that is to say democratic, united, and durable. Even more than this, it is worth asking whether governance of this kind can address today's problems in such a way to improve how people work together, with each and everyone involved able to achieve self-realization even as they advance a collective project. The author of this paper is convinced that there is an affirmative answer to both these questions. These answers could be helpful for involved actors in SSE (politicians, executives, managers, and academics) but also for people in the for-profit business system wanting to change their mindset.

The firm belief here is that mobilizing seminal SSE and CSR values (democracy, solidarity, and sustainability) will have a direct effect on team performance [19] if it is incorporated into the implementation of responsible governance. This materializes in the way power is distributed between (and exercised by) a company's Board and Executive Committee and in the way direct line management runs the operational teams. The present article constitutes a theoretical proposition, being the authors' point of view, and not a demonstration rooted in any objective field data. It seeks to elucidate the connection that should be drawn between companies' overall sustainable governance (seen as a governance respectful of the CSR values seen just before) and changes in their environment, while also describing how responsible team management, that is to say, a kind of management in line with the CSE values applied daily by the manager, might be handled in a way that satisfies employees' expectations while reflecting both ongoing changes in both the general spirit of the times and the meaning accorded to the business world as they know it [20]. Lastly, it is worth emphasizing the importance of accounting for these values when exercising responsible and sustainable governance and managing teams, with the additional objective at this level being to provide beneficiaries with a quality response to their needs, thereby enhancing corporate performance.

The transition from the modern era to the postmodern era has been accompanied by two paradigmatic changes: a renewed focus on persons rather than individuals [21] and the emergence of a kind of sustainable governance focused on common good instead of individual or general interests, which complements the definition proposed so far [22]. The paper's first section considers how SSE companies might incorporate these two elements into sustainable governance, highlighting the distribution of power between different categories of stakeholders and the way they use their respective responsibilities. The second section enacts the authors' belief that responsible team management derives from the overall
governance regime while considering the impacts postmodern governance has on direct line
management in organizations in this sector. Postmodern management is being proposed
here as a way of facilitating the transition from an emphasis on measuring and controlling
individual performance to one aiming to regulate intra-group human interactions. The
third section concludes the paper with the observation that in this one sphere, and given
the SSE's roots in particularly strong values, today's management practices need to be
supplemented. It is indispensable that an ethical dimension be integrated into postmodern
management, one that centers both on persons and on ensuring that the overarching
narrative is coherent with whatever practices are being implemented in application of SSE's
characteristic values close to the CSR's values. The idea here is that responsible managers
should focus on their specific mission, which is to create connections and share meanings. It
is with this responsible and sustainable approach, and by mobilizing the social innovations
and the basic values of democracy, solidarity, and sustainability underpinning companies
envisioned in this way, that postmodern management (starting in the sector that this paper
studies) can enhance the wellbeing of everyone, professionals and politicians alike (the
two main stakeholders), while also maximizing corporate performance.

It is important to notice that it is French point of view with a sustainable dimen-
sion based on a literature review composed by published studies in the field of coopera-
tives [23-25], mutual societies [26,27], associations [28,29] and other non-profit organiza-
tions [30,31] but not on a specific empirical approach. Our analysis is informed by these
results and our proposal is in line with the logic of the French thinkers of the social and
solidarity economy [32-34]. In a way it is an essay more than a demonstration, as other
articles or books published already [35-37]. Consequently, this article is a proposal which
could be lead to methodological work. Here is a first step, an empirical study could be
the second.

## 2. Governance of the Commons

A new and different sociological figure is emerging as citizen, who is linked with a
new vision highly connected to CSR of how humankind should manage a planet that is
widely understood today to be finite and no longer infinite, a vision that extends far past
company boundaries even as it invites people to come inside of them.

As Aristotle once taught, humans curiously take little care of the things that they
share and focus instead on what everyone owns individually [38]. This tendency is a real
problem in contemporary societies given the need to organize responsible and sustainable
coexistence on Planet Earth. It is also a challenge for companies that must not only imagine
how people might work together but also how they can live together at work. Aristo-
tle's paradox can neither be resolved by privatizing nor by nationalizing the Commons.
Limited resources make both solutions unworkable due to the unresolvable distribution,
governance, control, and sanction issues it raises.

Elinor Ostrom's great contribution in this area was to point out the obvious [39],
namely that resources' finite nature necessarily implies that their rarity be managed un-
der constraint. To overcome the problems this creates, forms of self-governance can be
implemented to address the peculiarities characterizing this asset: the nature of the Com-
mons itself; the number of stakeholders interested in it (and their respective degrees of
involvement); and the positive and negative externalities at work with each stakeholder,
etc. In other words, splitting up the Commons so that it can be appropriated and managed
individually would diminish and conceivably destroy the asset by creating conflict between
its stakeholders. Contrary to Hardin's suggestion that privatizing the Commons is the
best way of satisfying all parties [40], Ostrom averred that this solution would be the real
tragedy. With everyone trying to maximize the personal benefit they derive from the asset,
conflict would arise between each individual's own logic and make it impossible to achieve
any satisfactory level of general utility. The end result would be permanent fighting around
an asset that had first brought everyone together but could well disappear due to these
wars, one famous dead-end example being the river polluted by one stakeholder to prevent
anyone else from enjoying it. The one way to transcend this free market impasse is to get stakeholders to agree a collective and sustainable governance of the Commons [41]. It is a parable that seems particularly pertinent and adapted to the SSE sector, given the direct connections that it establishes with topics such as sustainable development and CSR, through non-profit and democratic functioning, for example.

After all, the SSE sector itself is best understood as a kind of Commons associating sev-
eral very different stakeholders, staff, beneficiaries, families, and communities, connected to
one another through their common interest, namely the quality of the response given to the
various needs that they have identified. SSE itself is a Commons that cannot be accurately
conceptualized without accounting for people's common interests, i.e., its governance must
be defined as precisely as possible to maximize the upside for everyone [42].

Otherwise, the organizations comprising the SSE sector should themselves be viewed
as a kind of Commons. Associations, cooperatives, or mutual companies are all composite
actors whose governance must be consolidated in a way that enables fair interactions
between the stakeholders involved in (and affected by) SSE institutions. These are collective
organizations born out of movements seeking to optimize the services delivered to users
grouped into communities of interest. Managing the Commons is therefore akin to a
strategic issue [43] linked to the culture of CSR.

Hence this paper's belief is that when it comes to governance, SSE sector companies should draw their inspiration from Ostrom. The idea here is to view SSE non-profits' sustainable governance in the broadest sense of the term, embodied in a governance structure incorporating a project's seminal goals, principles of ownership, allocation of benefits, decision-making processes and responsible team management regimes, while facilitating and supporting collective action. SSE companies work by pooling resources, intimating in turn a certain number of daily team management practices reinforcing dynamics of cooperation.

3. Postmodern Management in SSE: A French Perspective

This paper posits that SSE companies and organizations' sustainable governance must also affect direct line responsible management. The aforementioned changes should be reflected in the way that staff are managed and teams run within these structures, if only to avoid discrediting the whole project because too many people are suffering cognitive dissonance [44]. Managerial dimensions must transit away from the simple measurement and control of individual performance and focus on regulated human relations where everyone cooperates at work for the good of all. The idea here is that transitions of this kind spark superior performance by rooting team regulation in quality interpersonal relationships. The ultimate proposition here is that changing managers' professional hearts will increase their teams' effectiveness thanks to a responsible and sustainable management.

3.1. *From Measurement to Regulation*

There is no longer anyone anywhere today who will be satisfied within their profes-
sional sphere if they are treated no better than a cog in a machine. The time is ripe to design
a new driver of professional satisfaction, or to be more precise, a new way of ensuring that
everyone benefits from quality human relations at work. New tools, starting with digital
technology, and new methods of management should consolidate interpersonal relations by
intensifying interactivity, by not giving people tasks enclosing them in hermetic silos, and
by not overusing collaborative digital tools to such an extent that face-to-face encounters
no longer happen [45]. Meeting other people is a sine qua non for feeling fulfilled, but
encounters of this kind can only happen if they have been organized.

The fact that this interaction logic only works if people sincerely want to meet up
requires that attention be paid to this end result, if not by creating human relations then at
least by nurturing them. Controlling the spirit of cooperation within a company also helps
to reaffirm the corporate culture and build (or bolster) everyone's sense of belonging. These
are powerful collective performance drivers that must be cultivated and then organized by
managers promoting employees' engagement, desire to come to work, loyalty company devotion of offering customers quality service. Cooperation tends to culminate in the creation of a common body of work reflecting everyone's efforts, cum operare, even where it involves little more than the pleasure of working together, cum laborare, without anyone worrying about how this shared labor might be negotiated. To some extent, cooperation is akin to greater collaboration in the construction of meaning and devotion. It is up to the manager to create the conditions that will enable colleagues to move, if need be, from the latter mindset to the former [46].

Performance driven by managerial action clearly does not exist in a purely quantitative and measurable sense but can be estimated from several variables [47]. It is first and foremost a function of changing representations of success. These can fluctuate across companies and actors depending, where SSE organizations are concerned, on how much emphasis is placed on beneficiaries' satisfaction. Performance is also linked to the result of an action in and of itself, something that stakeholders will assess on an ex post basis. Lastly, performance also relates to nature of the action per se, along with the processes that have culminated in its success. All in all, there are more than enough ways to benchmark performance, which sometimes begins as an economic concern and is therefore judged from a profitability and/or productivity perspective, before adopting a legal dimension relating to legal and regulatory compliance along with solvency standards. Performance should also include an organizational component, with employee skills being developed to ensure that a company is consistent in the service responses that it offers. Lastly, performance is necessarily social, perhaps especially where SSE companies are concerned, since it can create synergies among stakeholders, intensify employees' involvement their daily activities (while increasing the satisfaction they get from carrying out their professional responsibilities), help develop corporate stakeholders' potential (politicians along with employees), and generally, enhance the quality of life at work. This paper views performance's ongoing improvement at these four levels (economic, legal, organizational, and social) as the regulating mission and operational challenges that direct line managers face in the companies where they work [48], thus showing the interest of a responsible and sustainable management.

Similar to all social activities, professional interactions are based on exchange. To be truly effective, however, they must extend beyond a first-order utilitarian interaction. If they are to enhance performance, such exchanges, especially where they happen in a professional setting, must help build or develop a project and/or devise a solution. In such cases, interactions will be based on a sharing logic driven by a sense of complicity, comradery, and collusion enabling both explicit and implicit agreement. Human relations here express the connections that have developed between people, ties further enriched by the ongoing development of such interactions, at which point inter-individual relationships become a kind of mutual enrichment that the organization and its managers always nurture and foment [21]. The topics of vulnerability, diversity, and inclusiveness have to be considered in this project of a responsible and sustainable postmodern management.

Organizations will have to help employees develop one another's ability to construct these relational modes by establishing the conditions under which such exchanges become feasible. They must stimulate and foster new relationships to cement employees' cohesion and induce their willingness to work collectively in order to achieve the ends for which the modus operandi was created in the first place, being the original project aims. It is only thusly that interpersonal interactions can be viewed as essential.

The new emergent work practices being witnessed today will gradually constitute new forms of work organization. Socially Responsible HRM is more than ever akin to wealth management, explaining the necessity of viewing all employees as strategic rather than adjustment variables. Towards this end, and again, more than ever, managers must act as creators facilitating relationships between the persons comprising their teams.
3.2. Fostering Human Relations within the Company

What managers must promote henceforth is an interactional construct of human relations. This includes increasing people's ability to listen to, understand, and appreciate one another despite their differences and vulnerabilities in order to create solidarities [49]. This is particularly true in a Covid Era [50], which is a crisis time. The greater this mutual understanding and reciprocal respect, the more the outcomes of these overtly cooperative relationships will be rich and fruitful. It is a sequencing that reveals one essential aspect of SSE companies' efforts to orchestrate human relations, the pleasure of exchanging with (and serving) one another. This point is particularly important in the treatment of the employment of people with disabilities [51].

This exchange and collectivism dynamic necessarily depend on the managers' regula-
tion role. After all, it is managers who must unleash the rhythms and intensities that mark
these interpersonal relationships. This is akin to the contrast between some African cultures'
palaver traditions with certain Europeans' Cartesian desire to imbue conversations with
purpose and rationality [52]. People in a hurry tend to have a negative assessment of others
who they see as doing nothing. In their view, time is money; making money means not
wasting time; so, speed is of the essence. In the end, modern men and women always
find themselves out of time. A book by the French writer Paul Morand exemplifies this
with a character named Pierre who is always rushing around feverishly, hence completely
missing out on (and even ruining) everything that is essential in life, friendship, love, and
children. It is the character's dizzying hyperactivity that makes him lose his taste for those
precious moments that give life its value and indeed its poetry. He eats himself up and
consumes everyone around him with his single-minded focus on achieving goals that,
once satisfied, must always be renewed. Edgwige the Wise is supposed to have asked
how people know that they have finally arrived at their destination when they never stop
moving [53]. Postmodern managers, and the meanings people give to things, progress at
a tempo dictated by quality human relationships that, in turn, are the bases of collective
efficiency. Being able to recognize when a destination has in fact been reached is a crucial
skill. But this will only be achieved if someone is willing to first taste salt of the earth,
without feeling the need to already start talking about the next race.

Managerial responsible regulation is not just a technique but an essential relational
action that encourages and structures personal relationships, construed here as sources of
wealth and the common good. This new kind of responsible management, one imbued with
sincere humanism, must encourage working conditions where personal satisfaction can be
attained through autonomy, a sense of being acknowledged and listened to, recognition
of one's singularity and subjectivity, and respect for one's emotions. The challenge and
purpose of responsible and sustainable postmodern management is to ensure the employees
of an organization, itself altered by major technological advances, to love the idea of being
entrepreneurial together, working as a tribe united by one and the same cause and driven
by the same principles of efficiency and solidarity [54]. It is only through harmonious
relationships described just after, regulated by managers, that this can be achieved.

It is under these conditions that human relations can be regulated in a way that breaks with old performance monitoring practices and encourages teams' engagement and willingness to do whatever they can to further the original project [55]. This is how different stakeholders can meet [56] to achieve mutual satisfaction and maximize collective well-being. It is here that a company's general governance framework intersects with its direct line management, with the latter being to some degree an extension of the former in those instances where it acts responsibly. It is also here that a project materializes by injecting into people's daily lives those values that had structured its creation, particularly where this involves determinant factors in SSE companies' responsible and sustainable governance, such as trust, democracy, a balance of power, and reputation [57].
# 4. Postmodern Management in SSE: A French Perspective

Regardless of its status, public, profit-making, or SSE, companies possess values that shape their operations and development above and beyond the simple structuring and organization of the business [58]. These values must therefore be seen as a body of beliefs and rules providing stakeholders with benchmarks that will orient and guide their actions. Of course, when companies and organizations act within frameworks requiring as much engagement as SSE does, the values on which a project is based will have an even greater structuring effect. As such and with regard to its allocation of power, a company's overall sustainable governance regime, together with its responsible management, will have to ensure that these values transform into key factors in the regulation of personal relations [59], doing this in a way that cares for everyone's wellbeing, enhancing collective performance, and serving the interests of protagonists and beneficiaries alike.

## 4.1. Where Values Become the Foundations

Every time an SSE company is created, the same story is told, a group of people decides to solve unresolved problems for profitability reasons or organizes itself to come up with a new answer to existing socioeconomic needs, all in a spirit of promoting greater solidarity within a given community. This story must be mobilized when implementing (or updating) the company's governance, if only because it is so crucial to the future managerial doctrine.

In both cases, it is the same spirit that dictates the rule: to paraphrase Max Weber, a conviction ethos takes priority over a responsibility ethos [60] with political concerns coming before economic imperatives. Once launched, the project must be steered, with the company then working to ensure long-term survival in a way that respects its seminal values and in accordance with the culture on which it was nurtured. The values presiding over the company's creation then have a preponderant effect on the organization's management mode [61]. In other words, after having structured the initial momentum enabling the project and the company's creation, the values must become the principles guiding its global responsible governance and management, de facto reinforcing the long-term ethical dimension's primacy over exclusively short-term economic thinking.

Note that if values are often mobilized within SSE, it is because they do not only structure the project in question, but also because they can become a strong cultural element that densifies connections between actors. It is not enough for activists or visionary politicians to structure a project and create ad hoc entities. Technicians must also use their skills to service the project and guarantee the company's long-term survival in a sustainable point of view. Sharing responsible and sustainable values and using politicians to transmit them to technicians is therefore one key to success [62]. Conversely, not using technical structures to share values is a trap that can frequently be fatal and often results from the operational implementation of a kind of governance that fails to balance politicians and technicians' power as per the aforementioned responsible version of good governance, that is to say a governance in line with the sustainability principles.

## 4.2. Values-Driven Organizations

The firm belief of the author of this paper is that a company's SSE values constitute strong elements of meaning affecting all of its stakeholders. Corporate performance depends on how these values are understood and apprehended [63]. For both reasons, governance and direct line management play an essential role.

Politicians, whether elected officials or SSE activists, are both the heart of the system and the custodians of its meaning. They must therefore constantly defend and reinvent the collective project for the sake of sustainability. To do this, they have to mobilize values and invoke them to build the company along two different directions, all the while without betraying its original purpose. Firstly, politicians are needed to renew an organization's technical structure—and secondly, they can be used to transmit its values. Lining up these different pieces constitutes one of SSE organizations' main global governance missions.
Politicians and activists are not the only ones to benefit from these kinds of corporate values. Employees also need to be informed so they can mobilize the values for managerial purposes and accelerate their own professional development. SSE companies offer an opportunity to reconcile success and personal fulfillment with a sense of action and social utility. In this case, a company's values and culture become a competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining employees. This is especially true for younger generations as recent studies have shown [64–67]. People must know how to fit into a collective and commit to its promise so that the extra soulfulness rooted in its corporate values can be used as staff motivation. It is up to managers to create that feeling.

Where a company shares its values and treats staff in accordance with them, the famous exemplarity imperative being a sine qua non of success, it allows employees and technical managers to participate in a collective by means of their work. In these kinds of situation, employees have access to an activist consciousness that befits their professional activity. This helps value-based management to create a new source of motivation, namely the idea of using work to concretize political ambitions by imbuing professional achievements with technical quality. The ultimate aim here is the wellbeing of each and every person involved [68,69], a project that can be implemented quite prudently thanks to new technologies (company social networks, learning communities, collaborative innovations, etc.) that were made possible by social innovations themselves enabled by postmodern management pursuing a dual mission: the creation of human relationships and the development of meaning.

All of this explains why both sustainable governance and responsible direct line management must be rooted in seminal SSE responsible and sustainable values (non-profit, democracy, and solidarity) if they are to define an operational framework and innovative managerial practices that will help everyone to flourish in their professional activity. It is a success clearly bound to contribute positively to a company's ability to perform its member service mission.

## 5. Conclusions

The contents of a message do not really count. After all, today's internet or Twitter users all apply the same principles. Nor does a message's tenor really matter, it suffices that the message exists. People are connected to one another. They relate to one another. It is because they possess certain attitudes, acknowledgement and a sense of belonging, that people join a tribe [70].

This is both a challenge for postmodern responsible management and a purpose. Staff in an organization that has been structured by the strength of its original collective project must have good reasons to want to communicate and to be entrepreneurial together, acting as a tribe united by the same sense of purpose and driven by the same principles of efficiency and solidarity. This applies especially to SSE tribe members and to the companies for which they work.

Even so, the strong belief that this paper has put forward is that team management can-
not exist without being launched by some kind of global sustainable corporate governance,
one whose implementation associates different stakeholders managing and structuring
what is their Commons, this becoming the “raison d’être” of any companies or organi-
zations implementing said values. Sustainable governance is not an individual affair.
Governing is a collective act that complements a company’s supervisory bodies, Board of
Directors and Executive Committee, with each continuing to fulfil its own role but being
jointly focused on addressing all stakeholders’ interests. It is this connection between
sustainable corporate governance and responsible team management, with both serving
the organizational project and collective interest, that generates performance, at least where
this succeeds in materializing as closely as possible to the level of each individual actor.
This can be achieved thanks to managers’ dual roles: they carry meaning; and they commu-
nicate project values [71]. By ensuring that its daily practices remain verifiably close to the
values of the organization, and to the SSE in general, managers reinforce staff members’
motivation and involvement by giving them a sense of belonging to an adventure, one rooted in collective solidarity. That is particularly true and important in a crisis time like COVID-19, where employees' state of mind depends on their self-determination [72].

This paper is a literary essay and suggests that the great changes which the world has gone through in recent decades further increase the pertinence of SSE companies' seminal protection and solidarity projects insofar as they mesh quite naturally both with the new forms of emerging sustainable governance (based on the construct of a Commons in the spirit of CSR) and with postmodern persons' new expectations (self-realization and relationships to others). This emphasized the need for a stakeholder-oriented global sustainable governance conducted via responsible managerial practices that are in accord with an organization's essential values and that also can improve their growth prospects and increase their competitiveness in the long run [73].

Enlighted by several empirical published studies, the authors' sincere belief is that in the SSE sector more than in others, responsible managerial practice must be aligned with organizational meaning. In SSE companies, it seems counterproductive to manage teams in an individualized and directive manner since better performance can logically only derive from a meaning- and value-based kind of management, one that is measured in terms of teams' motivation and involvement, and where these factors translate into lesser absenteeism, better service quality, greater retention of staff, etc.

In sum, this paper posits that to be more effective, SSE companies' management must differ from a classical variant characterized by individual performance measurement, instead, the new form should move towards a kind of regulating management of teams uniting around a sustainable project rooted in solidarity and collective values. To put it another way, it is only by developing their own specific type of responsible management that SSE companies can be coherent with themselves. Now, this idea should be tested in a specific exploratory study.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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