Commitment and performance of nonprofit board members

Boards of nonprofit organizations are entrusted to oversee and ensure that the organization remains true to its mission, functions within the confines of state and federal laws, and operates in a financially responsible manner. This critically important oversight is carried out by volunteers. This study examined the relationships between board member commitment and individual performance. Commitment was assessed using Meyer and Allen's Three‐Component Model of Commitment: Affective, Continuance, and Normative (1991). The population in this study was volunteer board members of midsized, social service nonprofit organizations in the Orange County, California, area. The strongest findings were between affective commitment and performance in board roles. Committed board members reported more involvement and are perceived by the executive to be more engaged and valuable. Analysis revealed that executive judgments of participation are based on both board member behavior and Affective commitment expressed by the board member.     

Inclusive Governance Practices in Nonprofit Organizations and Implications for Practice

An inclusive board seeks information from multiple sources, demonstrates an awareness of the community and constituents that benefit from and contribute to the organization's services, and establishes policies and structures to foster stakeholder contributions. This research investigated the prevalence of inclusive governance practices and its relationship to board composition, diversity attitudes, and recruitment practices. Fifty‐six executive directors and forty‐three board members representing sixty‐two nonprofit organizations returned a mailed survey (29 percent response rate). The study profiled two organizations that represented different styles of inclusive governance. The survey, part of a larger study, contained questions about inclusive practices, board composition, attitudes toward diversity, and recruitment practices. Most organizations indicated that they operate with inclusive governance practices. The organizational profiles provide a picture of boards that used different strategies to accomplish the goal of inclusivity. Boards that use more inclusive practices were not necessarily heterogeneous in board member composition. Inclusive boards were more inclined to be sensitive to diversity issues and used recommended board recruitment practices. The existence of a task force or committee on diversity was also significantly associated with a more inclusive board. Nonprofit organizations must consider their philosophy on stakeholder involvement, recognizing that different strategies lead to different levels of stakeholder involvement.     

Common Agency in Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations

Most theories of nonprofit organizations and nonprofit leadership recognize the multitude of stakeholders—including board members, donors and volunteers, funders, the media, and policy makers—that organizational leaders must contend with in doing their work. For nonprofits engaged in advocacy, demands from stakeholders may be even more challenging to meet. Although stakeholder theory recognizes the effect of various groups on an organization, it does not explain how leaders manage the preferences of their often‐competing stakeholders while they make choices for the organization. This study develops a common agency framework, evaluating the roles of three groups crucial to nonprofit advocacy organizations: the organization's board of directors, elected officials, and donors/members. The common agency framework is then illustrated with interviews with leaders of nonprofit advocacy organizations in California. Findings suggest that the leaders of these groups have a significant amount of discretion in guiding their organizations’ activities and operations.     

Contracting and Patterns of Nonprofit Governance

Executive staff and board members in nonprofit organizations that operate with government grants and contracts often work together to perform important governance functions. This shared responsibility can be predicted by strong executive leadership of the board, a board with highly regarded members, and affiliation with an influential statewide or regional association. The results of our research suggest that the distribution of governance responsibility in nonprofit organizations with government revenues should command the attention of researchers and activists.     

Designing Agendas to Reflect Board Roles and Responsibilities: Results of a Study

Over a nine‐month period the board agendas of a community nonprofit organization were redesigned to reflect a particular board agenda tool titled “Strategic Activities, Resource Planning, and Operations.” Feedback from the board members and executive director indicate strong support for the framework in focusing the work of the board. The framework also has implications for how the executive director and board members prepare for meetings and how the shared leadership of the meetings is played out.     

Revisiting Agency and Stewardship Theories

Using principal–agent theories, this study examined differences in the perceptions of nonprofit chief executive officers (CEOs) and board chairs on key governance aspects, including board performance, leadership, satisfaction with diversity, and board meetings. Using data from the CEOs and board chairs of 474 nonprofit organizations, we found statistically significant differences in the governance perceptions of these leaders of nonprofit organizations. The findings provide support for an agency theory explanation about the differing interests of principals (board chairs) and agents (CEOs). The findings suggest that these two sets of nonprofit actors frequently operate from different perspectives, potentially affecting the governance of their organizations.     

Into the Fire: Boards and Executive Transitions

Managing the transition an organization undergoes when one chief executive leaves and another is hired is both a defining responsibility and one of the most critical jobs a governing board faces. CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, which consulted to twenty‐eight organizations going through such transitions, found that three characteristic threats to successful transitions for nonprofit boards emerged: (1) boards underestimate the risks and costs of bad hires; (2) boards are typically unprepared for the task; and (3) boards too often focuson the problems in hiring new CEOs and fail to make full use of the opportunities in CEO transitions. This article describes the development of services to help organizations in transition, gives results from the first two years of work, and offers suggestions for support to boards and for future research.     

Scarce as hen's teeth: Women CEOs in large nonprofit organizations

This study examines an underlying mechanism behind the gender gap in nonprofit executive leadership, focusing on the link between the representation of women on governing boards and the hiring of female CEOs. The analysis of 340 human services organizations with gross receipts greater than $10 million in GuideStar's database reveals that organizations where women make up between one third and half of the board are more likely to have a female CEO compared to organizations where women account for less than one third or a majority of the board. The findings suggest that nonprofit organizations are more likely to hire a female CEO when women constitute a “substantial minority” of the governing board.     

The Impact of Board Diversity and Expertise on Nonprofit Performance

This study examined the impact of board of director characteristics on nonprofit performance. Using data collected through a survey of nonprofit colleges and universities, the author provides evidence that specific board member characteristics are vital in shaping the financial and nonfinancial success of nonprofit institutions of higher education. Results indicate that both board member diversity and expertise are associated with better‐performing organizations. This work makes important initial forays into the relationships between board of director qualities and nonprofit performance. Although limited by the relatively small sample of colleges and universities, this study is unique in its ability to analyze nonprofit boards and both financial and nonfinancial performance measures.     

The Embeddedness of Nonprofit Leadership in Civic Governance

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This study examined how board chairs and executive directors of nonprofit civic engagement organizations interpreted their...     

Fraud survival in nonprofit organizations: Empirical evidence

This study examines the survival of nonprofit organizations after the discovery of a fraud. Literature on nonprofit fraud claims that fraud has a destructive impact on nonprofit organizations. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence of the impact of fraud on a nonprofit organization's survival, and to analyze the significance of underlying organizational and fraud factors. An analysis of 115 nonprofit organizations experiencing a fraud shows that over one fourth of these organizations did not survive at least 3 years beyond the publication of the fraud, a rate considerably higher than the typical nonprofit failure rate. This article investigates the characteristics of surviving organizations and finds that older and larger organizations are more likely to survive, indicating the liabilities of newness and smallness hold in fraud survival situations. In cases where an executive‐level perpetrator committed the fraud, or where the organization victimized the public, the organization was less likely to survive. These findings suggest nonprofit organizations, particularly those that are new or small, could benefit by implementing governance policies and procedures that are consistent with those employed by more established organizations.     

Effective boards: how executive directors define and develop them

There is growing recognition in the nonprofit field that the executive director has a key role in determining whether the board of directors will function effectively. To aid executives in this vital role, two recent studies defined a "good board" from the point of view of two samples of executive directors of community agencies, then sought factors related to board performance as measured by this definition. In interviews, executives whose boards scored higher than their peers on this performance measurement related how they work with their boards in such areas as recruitment of new members, financial management, fundraising, and leadership development.     

What Nonprofit Executives Want and What They Get from Board Members

In theory, nonprofit boards of directors exist to perform mission‐setting and oversight functions that help to ensure organizational accountability. Yet there is evidence that board behavior often falls short of this ideal. Using survey data from a sample of 241 executive directors of nonprofit agencies, we investigated whether nonprofit boards are meeting executive directors’ expectations, and if not, what factors explain this? We find that although board behavior tends to align closely with executive directors’ preferences for involvement in administration and management tasks, there is a greater disconnect between board behavior and executive directors’ preferences for involvement in mission‐setting and oversight duties. Factors that mitigate this gap include organizational professionalization and stability, whereas more extensive reliance on government funding exacerbates it. Female executive directors experience a greater disconnect in their preferences for board involvement and actual board involvement than male executive directors. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for both theory and practice.     

Patterns of governance structures in trade associations and unions

Most research on the governance of nonprofit organizations concentrates on welfare‐oriented organizations and disregards other types of nonprofits. This article examines the governance structures of trade associations and unions as a special type of nonprofit organization. Analysis is based on a qualitative case study survey of thirty Swiss trade associations. The results distinguish four categories of governance: satellite governance, delegate governance, executive governance, and inner‐circle governance.     

Board performance and organizational effectiveness in nonprofit social services organizations

This article examines the tasks and responsibilities of nonprofit boards of directors and explores the relationship between board performance and organizational effectiveness. Thirty-three activities in nine areas of board responsibility were examined through questionnaires and interviews with board members and chief executive officers of sixteen nonprofit organizations serving developmentally disabled adults. Rankings of organizational effectiveness were determined using external evaluators and accreditation surveys. A significant relationship between board performance and organizational effectiveness was found, and the board activities most strongly correlated with organizational effectiveness are reported, including policy formation, strategic planning, program monitoring, financial planning and control, resource development, board development, and dispute resolution.     

Managing stakeholder relationships and nonprofit organization effectiveness

This research examined how nonprofit organizations manage their relationships with stakeholders and how these practices relate to perceived organization effectiveness. We conducted semistructured, open‐ended interviews with executive directors of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to discover whom they see as their stakeholders, the types of expectations they encounter from stakeholders, and the practices they use in managing stakeholder relationships. The two nonprofits that were evaluated as most effective used a consistent, thematic rationale in dealing with stakeholder issues: one organization discussed its actions in terms of its mission and core values, the other based its actions in terms of building relationships and networks. Our study suggests that organizations that ground their external relations in issues that are recognized as good nonprofit management, and do so consistently across stakeholder groups, will tend to be rated as more effective by multiple, external evaluators.     

Called to order: A board president in trouble

This is a fictionalized case based on real events. It is intended as a teaching tool to stimulate discussion about procedural issues in nonprofit governance; board roles and responsibilities; communications; and relationships between boards, chairs, and executives, particularly in the context of smaller organizations. It is meant to support sessions on nonprofit boards and governance in introductory courses on nonprofit management or for use in workshops with new or less experienced executives and board members. Set in an organization engaged in cultural exchange, the case can be used in introductions to nonprofit management, arts administration, or international nongovernmental management.     

The Contextual Impact of Nonprofit Board Composition and Structure on Organizational Performance: Agency and Resource Dependence Perspectives

We study the relation between stability of the nonprofit organization’s environment and its board structure and the impact of this relation on organizational performance from the perspectives of both Agency Theory and Resource Dependence (Boundary Spanning) Theory. The impact of board characteristics on organizational performance is contextual. Specifically, we predict and show for a sample of U.S. nonprofits that board mechanisms related to monitoring are more likely to be effective for stable organizations, whereas board mechanisms related to boundary spanning are more effective for less stable organizations. We find that the two theories are complementary and address different aspects of nonprofit performance, but the results are statistically stronger and more often consistent with resource dependence than with agency theory. Overall, this study supports Miller-Millesen’s (Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 32: 521–547 2003) contention that, because the nonprofit environment is often more complex and heterogeneous than the for-profit world, no one theory describes all tasks of nonprofit boards.     

Board members' influence on the government-nonprofit relationship

This study examines whether, how, and under what conditions nonprofit boards of directors influence the government and voluntary sector relationship. The survey responses of executive directors and board presidents in a randomly selected sample of 400 nonprofit organizations indicate that boards are not bystanders in the contracting relationship with government. Rather, many boards play multiple roles, simultaneously enhancing interdependence and maintaining the boundary between state government and nonprofits.     

Leadership in faith‐based nonprofits

This case study illustrates the unique challenges of leading a faith‐based nonprofit organization within a multifaith constituency in Asia. The core themes of the case are based on research conducted with the staff, executive team, and board members of an international faith‐based nonprofit organization in Asia. Specifically, the case focuses on three identity‐based leadership dilemmas in relation to (1) creating a shared sense of organizational identity, (2) talent management, and (3) board governance. By describing the challenges faced by the CEO, the case shows how a strong faith‐based identification can positively bind an organization together, but also result in organizational blind spots with unintended consequences.