Entrepreneurial organizations are structures that develop ideas from all members, promoting alternative views and projects (Burger-Helmchen, 2013). Their social function aims to facilitate cohesion between people, institutions, and a collective conscience (Barbaro, 2008). For the theory of separation (Friedman, 1962; Werhane and Freeman, 1999; Alzola, 2011), social function and profits are two separate and independent missions of an entrepreneurial organization. Many authors have attempted to reconcile this dualism through research (Freeman, 2000; Freeman et al., 2004; Wempe, 2008; Hartman, 2011). The theory of separation follows an ideological dualism, whereby the entrepreneurial world (Thorpe et al., 2006), based on profit and with an individual mode, fights against a collective strategy, which aims to achieve a common good and neglects earnings. Recently, however, there has been a change due, in part, to overcome the ideological contraposition that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of many state-run enterprises (Yanishev-Nesterova, 2020), when it became necessary to create a new entrepreneurial paradigm that united the entrepreneurial efficiency with a sensitivity to social, ecological, and community areas (Magala, 2002). Even before the fall of Communism, there was debate over whether an extremist approach of maximum vs. minimal state intervention was sufficient for finding a solution for the economy in some countries (Valaskakis, 1987), suggesting a strategy, in which, state institutions form partnerships with the entrepreneurial world to tackle certain problems. Social entrepreneurship is not a recent topic, having been studied since the 1970s (Moran, 1976), not only in authoritarian countries, where there is a need for the state to perform social functions to reach consensus (Tuber, 2019) but also in democratic and liberal countries, following a research path that can be considered parallel to studies about the classic entrepreneurial paradigm. In this case, there is an unavoidable need to reconcile a social mission with an earnings goal, which can be realized through rational resource management. Emotions (Graca, 2017) and moral emotions are important for giving information that could not be delivered through simple, rational, and emotionally deprived thinking, not only for an insufficient perception of reality (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2018) but also to help us perceive the suffering and disagreement of others, to improve their lives, and to avoid anger, sadness, anxiety, and negative behavioral consequences, thereby preventing aggressive acts (Caprara et al., 2014). The quest to overcome the past division between emotions and rationality began with the ancient Greek dualism of “pathos” and “logos” and continued throughout the subsequent centuries. This contraposition was eliminated by the psychoanalytic approach (Freud, 1911; Rayner, 1995; Blanco, 2019), whereby the human mind is shown to work without following a rational line, using cognitive sciences (Beck, 1967; Arnold, 1984), in which emotion, rational processes, and cognitive functions are melted down to give us the opportunity to evaluate and manage our daily lives using the emotive intelligence paradigm (Goleman, 1996), which states that even people with the highest scores on the traditional intelligence quotient (IQ) test can perform worse than people with lower IQs but higher emotional intelligence. Emotions are important during strategic phases of organizational life, such as succession (Manzoor et al., 2018), especially in a family firm (Razzak et al., 2019). Emotions are important for reinforcing our moral and social motivations, which propel our actions toward reaching a less selfish goal that is more oriented toward equity and justice ideals. An important position in this paradigm is the stakeholder, a person or group interested in pursuing specific goals—in this case, also oriented toward social responsibility—within an organization (McVea and Freeman, 2003; Verkerk, 2013; Correa and Larringa, 2015; Barrena Martinez et al., 2016; Elizandro et al., 2018) in the areas of sport (Escamilla-Fajardo et al., 2020), education (Tolochko et al., 2020), environment (Lawrence et al., 2020), engineering (Cierna and Sujova, 2020), or medicine (Blau et al., 2012; Lierville et al., 2015; Stawicki and Firstenberg, 2018; Lomakina, 2020; Naslund, 2020).

There is a dualistic conception: An organization with a “pure” entrepreneurial philosophy, founded on profit and an individualistic view based on a zero-sum-game, where the profits of an organization are more important than the richness and wellness of society; in contrast, there is an organization that adopts a strategy strictly oriented to improving society, in terms of health, security, quality of life, or other aspects, without consideration for profit, resulting in a poor or sometimes negative economic balance (Nikodemska-Wolowik, 2008; Kirzner, 2019; Mensik, 2019). The social accounting for the stakeholder model is a paradigm, where even an entrepreneurial organization that is usually focused on satisfying only the interests of its founders and shareholders must also consider the needs of the society and the community in which it operates (Hadden, 2012; Tang and Luo, 2016; Bhatia et al., 2020; Dimitropoulos, 2020). While a traditional entrepreneurial approach involves capital investment by one person, two or more associates, or a total or prevailing state capital, there has recently appeared a new form of capital contribution, crowdfunding (Pavlidou et al., 2020). This is a solid alternative to these strategies because institutional resources are often delayed by bureaucratic procedures, while spontaneous fundraising by a private organization depends on the individual willingness of organizational associates. This strategy, which is more efficient, has been used in different areas, such as social entrepreneurship (Morell et al., 2020; Figueroa-Armijos and Berns, 2021; Motero et al., 2021), research (Dalrup et al., 2020), and start-up development (Lee and Lehdonvirta, 2020; Shi et al., 2021), to help different small investors support international entrepreneurial activity (Tiberius and Hauptmeijer, 2021) or cope with international crises, due to ecologic emergencies (Predkiewcz and Kalinowska-Beszczynska, 2020) or pandemics (Saleh et al., 2021). Previously, these areas could be treated in a sufficiently short time because, while public institutions are dedicated to managing problems that are potentially harmful to the community, they are sometimes limited by bureaucracy, political dynamics, priorities on interventions, and temporary or permanent lack of resources; meanwhile, private organizations have difficulty managing some national crises that make it necessary to switch from a profit-making to a social mindset. This difficulty emerged clearly during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that started in 2020 when both liberal and centralized systems faced important difficulties for the aforementioned reasons, including liberal countries with a profit-making philosophy, delayed lockdowns, and antiepidemic measures to save money and economic activities; in contrast, governments that put the wellness of people first had important difficulties for a more complex reason, that is, people in this situation were considered more important than the economy, but many workers suffered from the pause in economic activities, while many citizens also suffered a perceived loss of freedom to move due to lockdowns imposed in different countries around the world. This situation made politicians respond to different requests from people, with demands to guarantee health but also work rights, which are irreconcilable aspects; whoever has to state a priority between these two functions suffers a sort of “double bind,” risking the loss of political appreciation by choosing one over the other. Organizations must consider socio-emotional aspects without focusing only on profit-making goals and considering their social function, based on a genuine and sincere motivation, without following a consensus approach that is typically adopted by political leaders or parties, who change their priorities to maintain power (Gellatelly and Kiernan, 2003).

We believe that socio-emotional factors are not just for consideration in clinical studies as a psychological weakness that needs to be cured but also in a positive way, as psychological wellbeing indicators or protective factors within organizational studies. Our hypotheses can be summarized as follows:

In this study, we considered the influence of socio-emotional factors on the life of organizations, considering both negative consequences, where a “suffering” organization is characterized by negative emotions among its members, studying its normal working and functioning considering a normal socio-emotional process, or considering records mentioning organizational strategies based on the socio-emotional aspects. We used the PRISMA statement (Liberati et al., 2009) to refine our research, using SCOPUS to obtain a literature review about this phenomenon, without considering the publication year 2021 and considering all records marked as articles or reviews, excluding conference articles, conference reviews, editorials, letters, notes, short surveys, erratum, books, and book chapters. We used a Boolean String “ORGANIZATION” AND “EMOTIONAL VALUE,” OR “SOCIAL VALUE” and excluded all pertinent records regarding non-psychological or organizational business areas. We considered only records with the following inclusion criteria:

We also stated exclusion criteria and did not consider records defined by the below keywords within their subject area because they did not involve a psychological aspect:

Once we refined a list of records on SCOPUS, we used VOSviewer (Waltman et al., 2010) to create a cluster analysis using author keywords and excluding redundant keywords, reusing SCOPUS to cite them within each cluster.

We extrapolated 1,761 records. The first mention citing the influence of socio-emotional value on organizations appears in a publication of 1922 (Link, 1922), describing a Psychological Service Centre, where, despite strong stress on individual psychology among first clinical psychological contributions, there is a significant sensibility about organizational functioning, going beyond simple individual psychology. After this first work, there were no further articles for almost 20 years, with some articles after the 1960s about therapeutic groups and health organizations. If we consider the number of records during each decade between the 1960s and the 2020s, as we can observe in Table 1, we notice an exponential incrementation of studies about this area, with more than 50 articles published by the 1990s. We hypothesized that the importance of socio-emotional influence on organizations is due to the birth of interest in emotions (Burton, 1963; Krebs, 1975; Hoppe, 1983; Goodnow, 1990) outside clinical and experimental psychology, which, up to the second half of the twentieth century, were exclusively treated within psychotherapy studies and laboratory walls.

Continuing to represent a graphical trend in Figure 1, we revealed that this trend has grown over the last 20 years, with a vail between 2005 and 2010 (probably due to the important economic crisis during 2007–2009) and a good incrementation after 2015.

If we consider countries that have published at least 30 records about this topic, we can observe in Figure 2 that the United States is the highest publishing country, with a significant gap to others. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia are the first three countries treating this topic, showing the supremacy of an Anglo-Saxon research approach, even though many Asian and European countries contribute.

Considering most active journals as presented in Tables 2, 3, we underline how much socio-emotional value is a core topic in most business management publications, where the organization has to consider the variables in order to have a peculiar sensitivity to satisfying community requests and to preserve a positive organizational climate and individual wellness among personnel. Some journals in this area have an h-index superior to 40, showing how much this area attracts important research teams.

Despite the Anglo-Saxon supremacy of the literature, if we consider the most productive authors, there are many contributions from Spanish, Turkish, Israeli, and Indian researchers. The most prolific author on this list is Applebaun from a Business School in Montreal, who has written articles about leadership and stereotypes among organizations (Applebaun et al., 2016c). Emotional intelligence is an important area of interest for various authors (Boyatzis, 2009; Boyatzis and Ratti, 2009; Gabel-Shemueli and Dolan, 2011; Meisler, 2014): Eisenberger, affiliated with the Psychology Department in Houston, focuses on organizational perceived support, another important aspect in the wellbeing of employees (Ameli et al., 1998; Kim et al., 2016; Kurtessis et al., 2017), and Karatepe and Srivastava are Turkish and Indian researchers, respectively, who publish articles about negative socio-emotional aspects regarding organizations, such as burnout or work-family conflict (Karatepe and Tekinus, 2006; Karatepe and Zargar-Tizabi, 2011; Karatepe, 2015; Srivastava et al., 2019; Srivastava and Argawal, 2020; Srivastava and Dey, 2020).

We used VOSviewer to divide the previous group of articles on SCOPUS, using their author keyword co-occurrence. We stated a minimum of 10 occurrences, extrapolating 53 items. We revealed a graphical representation, which was regrouped into six different clusters. These clusters, with their co-occurrence, are graphically represented in another image in Figure 3.

This is the cluster regrouping with the highest record number (18% prevalence) and recalls significant distress within organizations (Peng et al., 2010; Reed et al., 2018), regarding both users and personnel, where the psychological suffering of the first damages the second and vice versa. Stress (Deckard and Present, 1989; Micael et al., 2008; Richardsson et al., 2008; Martinèz et al., 2013; Sheldon et al., 2015; Linden et al., 2018; Prada-Ospina, 2019), anxiety (Goetz et al., 2006; MacNeil et al., 2009; Inal et al., 2010; Shongwe and Cilliers, 2020; Wu et al., 2020), and depression (LeDoux et al., 1998; Galvin et al., 2006; Jafri et al., 2011; Karatepe and Zargar-Tizabi, 2011; Rooney and Grant, 2013; Wu et al., 2020) are principal indicators of this psychological symptomatology, sometimes reaching dangerous levels and becoming a psychiatric emergency (Johnson et al., 2016; Gil-Rivas et al., 2019). This vulnerability makes personnel members uncomfortable, causing burnout (Booth and Faulkner, 1986; Gupchup et al., 1994; Robinson et al., 2003; Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2011; Rama-Maceiras et al., 2012; Glaser and Hect, 2013; Huynh et al., 2014; Malik et al., 2016), which has important consequences not only at the individual level but also to family and working performance (Glaser and Hect, 2013; Babic et al., 2020).

This study did not only consider emotional (Lombard, 2021) or social (Micaelson, 2021) values because these constructs are often used interchangeably, even if there are some important differences. In contrast to the “hard” sciences, we treated a research area full of disturbing variables as decision science, where we must adopt a complexity paradigm (Jorm et al., 2021). Considering a negative attitude through socio-emotional influence, people who use an emotional approach are irrational and potentially target manipulation (Lenidou and Lenidou, 2009; Yang, 2016). Our topic analysis uses cluster mapping with two orthogonal Cartesian axes in Figure 4, giving a graphical setting, where the horizontal defines a cluster mostly centered on individual wellness or, in contrast, defining an organizational setting, while the vertical is more oriented to a negative consequence/state or a positive way.

In a synthetic description, the position of every record under the same cluster could be in a different graphical area. For example, burnout is a keyword under cluster 1. Many authors define burnout as a syndrome characterized by individual psycho-physic suffering, which can also regard some causes and consequences related to the entire organization of a worker, defining this construct and its cluster negatively, but connected at both an individual and organizational level (Schulz et al., 1995; Yip and Rowlinson, 2009; Brown and Quick, 2013; Jones-Schenk, 2019). It emerges as a balanced result, whereby cluster 1, with the highest number of co-occurrence, is related to psychopathological problems, but the other clusters are positively related to socio-emotional values, where there is a positive influence that improves protective aspects in organizations. The emotional intelligence or other aspects bring potential improvement to organizational performance in terms of a more efficient organization and communication (clusters 3 and 4), personal skills, and inner positive characteristics for better interpersonal competence (clusters 2 and 5) or considering the psychological needs of users and patients to improve their wellness (cluster 6).

Our three hypotheses have been verified by this review.

For this research, we found many records, even considering only English-language articles and reviews and only using the SCOPUS database to focus on the research topic. This must be underlined as a limitation, as we excluded other databases.

People working within an organization and the same management rules are strongly moved by a purely rational mechanism, and problems that organizations treat cannot be solved following only rational logic. Kahneman and Tversky (1981), Kahneman (2003), and Thaler and Sunstein (2008), demonstrate that emotions strongly determine important human decisions, even significant financial investments. Recalling the beginning of this study, the theory of separation brings an organizational attitude that spoils the organization from their social function, creating an extremist world consideration, in which an organization cannot consider the possibility of earning money by considering the common good, neglecting environmental sensitivity, labor and political rights, urban sustainable development, and creating wars and exploitation. Trying to overwhelm an ideological approach, the integration of profit and social function must involve socio-emotional elements among organizations introducing social accountability (Hadden, 2012; Tang and Luo, 2016; Bhatia et al., 2020; Dimitropoulos, 2020), which aims to obtain a balanced0 vision between these two dimensions. Emotions are fundamental to moving managers to a major social sensitivity and an ethical approach to business management (Rok, 2009; Fairchild, 2010; Capell and Gabell-Shemueli, 2013; Caldwell and Hayes, 2016; Asgary and Lawrence, 2020), better communication (Dibben, 2004; Swift and Hwang, 2013; Lim et al., 2018), and improved organizational performance (Gabel-Shemueli and Dolan, 2011; Wei and Li, 2011; Bettis-Outland and Guillory, 2018), preventing conflict (Flanagan and Henry, 1994; Leggat and Balding, 2013; Gokturk et al., 2017; Herkes et al., 2019) and suffering (Micael et al., 2008; Richardsson et al., 2008; Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2011; Martinèz et al., 2013; Rooney and Grant, 2013; Shongwe and Cilliers, 2020). There has been an important incrementation rate during the last 20 years on this topic probably due to the generalized growth of the research. The economic crisis of 2008–2009 reopened discussion of the importance of social function among entrepreneurial organizations, where the exaggerated free economic speculation of single businessmen damaged Western economies; it was the failure of a liberal system that equaled the fall of the Berlin Wall almost 20 years before, where, on the contrary, there was a socialistic failure with an overcentralized economy, which limited entrepreneurial freedom, creating a closed and not competitive market. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed significant neglect of the socio-emotional influence of human behaviors.

Many countries around the world have delayed a tempestive and preventive intervention and have underestimated the pandemic problem in favor of a short-term economic decision strategy, which does not consider long-term effects and consequences (Zang et al., 2020). Different enterprises, such as fashion firms (Zara, Armani, Zegna, H&M, Gucci, etc.), have reconverted some of their factories for the production of medical instruments. Surely, the smart working, already existing, will receive a better diffusion and application, and any service or selling activities are improving in the educational, medical, or selling sectors (Soled et al., 2020; Spurlock, 2020). An important intervention in many countries is the educational system, changing the teaching style, no longer being based on face-to-face relations (Choe and Choi, 2020). There is now a confrontation between economic superpowers, and Europe has to participate as a single country formed by different nations. There is some financial European aid, which is implementing different economic aid programs for each individual European nation. Moreover, there are—beyond the usual European projects that the EU promotes annually—different specific European projects, such as Pan European Hackaton #EUvsVirus, which regroups different people from every European country, with different preparations who create different projects to fight the emergency using different focus areas.

This strategy is predominantly insufficient and prioritized economic and sanitarian aspects, where the latter mostly considered just medical aspects without considering a bio-psycho-social model (Engel, 1977), which could properly set a better preventive intervention strategy, avoiding a delay of contention strategy against the virus and with chaotic management of the health emergency, where a late intervention by health workers only partially coped with the biological risk, but almost totally neglected the psycho-social negative consequences of the pandemic, creating important discomfort among the population (Griffith, 2020; Banerjee et al., 2021; Jokic-Begic et al., 2021; Szmulewitz et al., 2021; Taylor et al., 2021). COVID-19 is not only a pandemic, which has caused the death of millions of people, but it has also seriously damaged world economies, creating a psycho-social impairment among the population and acting negatively toward organizational vulnerabilities among work and health organizational systems, considering, in this case, only the economic priority, with biological risk as a secondary consideration. However, even in this case, only the medical aspect of this drama was considered, neglecting plenty of effective prevention (better than a cure!) being realized by considering psychological intervention (Hanna-Attisha and Olson, 2021; Mimiaga et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2021). It is difficult to maintain critical thinking in this case, and often people fail in this task because it is easier to follow emotional thinking (Wynes, 2021; Yu et al., 2021), which has often negatively influenced socio-political decisions, for example, creating and maintaining populist movements, which are stronger in uncertain times (Bone, 2021). Stakeholder accountability moves its actions through a complex situation, especially during an actual socio-economic crisis, where there is a significant impairment in terms of social cohesion and trust between people and institutions (Antinyan et al., 2021; Fikukova et al., 2021; Surina et al., 2021; Ye et al., 2021). The accountability of stakeholders means that a single person or a group of people operate for an individual initiative, without an institutional setting, following their own principles, intrinsic rules, and ethics (Salsbury et al., 2018). There are some easy ways to lead in this situation, in which, people must cope with another great challenge: to cooperate with the institution and other people within the same organization or become an autocratic leader, taking every decision alone, deciding easier and faster, but forgetting a democratic approach and risking important mistakes (Zarinah et al., 2017; Hentschel et al., 2018; Levene and Higgs, 2018). History has many examples of “gifted” people in moral and leadership terms who take charge, with all the decision-making power in their hands and guide the destiny of entire countries.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

TP and GC stated keywords and build the cluster analysis. TP contributed to write and sampling statistics. BH-S and GC contributed to discussion. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.