The Relationship between Provision of Membership Benefits and Fulfillment of Representational Roles in Nonprofit Advocacy Membership Organizations

This article explores the ways nonprofit advocacy membership organizations can manage their resource dependence on members and fulfill the organizations' representational roles, focusing on the provision of membership benefits. Membership organizations rely on financial or other resources from members and thus are constrained by them. For a nonprofit that aims to primarily speak for members, constraints by members may help to focus organizational attention on members' interests. Contrarily, for a nonprofit that aims to mainly represent broader constituents, members' constraints may hamper an organization's ability to advocate for broader constituents because members do not necessarily share the same policy goals with broader constituents. The provision of membership benefits can be a useful strategy for organizations to fulfill their representational roles and to satisfy and engage members, because people often join an organization to enjoy certain membership benefits. For an empirical analysis, this study collected a large‐scale data set through web and mail surveys of nonprofit advocacy organizations across the United States. The mixed‐mode surveys achieved a 57.5 percent response rate (729 responses). The survey and regression analysis results show that member‐serving nonprofits providing members with opportunities to participate in advocacy work are more likely to represent members' interests directly. Although broader constituency‐serving nonprofits tend to prioritize members' opinions, these organizations are more likely to adhere to the mandates of broader constituents when providing selective material membership benefits. However, when providing purposive membership benefits, these nonprofits are more likely to represent members' opinions.     

Degree and Direction of Paid Employee/Volunteer Interchange in Nonprofit Organizations

This study builds on an earlier one (Handy, Mook, and Quarter 2008) that examined the degree of interchangeability between volunteers and paid employees in nonprofit organizations. In the current study, we surveyed 836 nonprofits in Canada to understand what factors determine the degree of interchange between paid employees and volunteers, bearing in mind that this interchange can go in two directions: paid employees for volunteers and volunteers for paid employees. We found the degree of interchange to be widespread and in both directions. One of the most important predictors of the likelihood of interchange was the number of full‐time employees, suggesting that interchangeability occurs less frequently in organizations with a larger number of employees than in those with fewer employees. Religious congregations and organizations with workload increases were more likely to interchange tasks among volunteers and paid staff.     

Determinants of Employee Creativity: A Survey of Lithuanian Nonprofit Organizations

Building on the current creativity literature, the authors developed and tested a model of employee creativity in a sample of Lithuanian nonprofit organizations. It was hypothesized that individual cognitive style, intrinsic motivation, leadership behaviors, job design, cultural norms of diversity, and work group relations would be related to employee creativity. Sixty nonprofit organizations were randomly sampled from the Database of Lithuanian Nonprofit Organizations and packets containing questionnaires were mailed to the organizations that agreed to participate. One hundred and twenty two questionnaires were returned out of 180 total (67.8% response rate). Results showed that innovative cognitive style, intrinsic motivation, and cultural norms for diversity were the most important predictors, explaining 41.5% of variance in employee creativity. Suggestions for hiring and staff development practices are provided along with implications for future research.     

Representational Roles of Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations in the United States

This research explores what roles nonprofits play in political representation by applying the concept of the representational role to nonprofits. The representational role consists of representational focus and style. Representational focus shows those whom nonprofits aim to serve: members, constituents, or the general public. Representational style denotes the ways nonprofits advocate for their focal groups: the delegation, trusteeship, and education styles. The survey and regression analysis results demonstrate that nonprofits serving their members are most likely to convey their members’ voices directly to policy makers: the delegation style. In contrast, nonprofits advocating for their constituents are likely to pursue what they independently identify as their constituents’ interests: the trusteeship style. Finally, nonprofits speaking for the general public are most likely to work toward educating the general public: the education style. These results suggest that nonprofits play different roles in political representation, depending on the types of their focal groups.     

Accountability in Nonprofit Organizations

Accountability, Performance Reporting, Comprehensive Audit: An Integrated Perspective, by Guy LeClerc, W. David Moynagh, Jean-Pierre Boisclair, and Hugh R. Hanson. Ottawa: CCAF-FCVI (Canadian Comprehensive Auditing Foundation- Fondation Canadienne pour la Verification Integral), 1996. 373 pp., $85.00 (Canadian, plus shipping) cloth. Managing for Accountability: Preserving the Public Trust in Public and Nonprofit Organizations, by Kevin P. Kearns. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. 255 pp., $27.95 cloth.     

The Third Way Reconfigured: How and Why Nonprofit Organizations are Shifting Their Human Resource Management

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are facing increasing demands to become more efficient and effective, especially given increasing financial cutbacks, the rising demand for services and the push toward performance-related management. Human resource management (HRM) is claimed to play an important role in coping with these challenges. Yet, within the field of nonprofit management, little is known about the configuration of HR architectures in NPOs, let alone their impact on performance. To bridge this gap, we conduct an exploratory multiple case study in ten health and social services NPOs. The case study data indicates a shift toward a dominant strategic orientation in the configuration of HRM. Our article makes a central contribution by uncovering a third way in which NPOs seek a specific configuration of HRM to confront the challenges they face in their internal and external environments.     

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.     

Stakeholder Performance Measurement in Nonprofit Organizations

According to recent findings, nonprofit organizations should address the relationships of nonprofit service quality, satisfaction, loyalty, and organizational identification when planning and evaluating donor surveys. This article presents a donor satisfaction barometer that can be used to gain insights into the strength of these key relationships and thereby establish a basis for calculated relevant indices. With such indices, nonprofit organizations can compare stakeholder performance over time and benchmark themselves against other organizations. Data from 2,599 blood donors to one section of the German Red Cross, collected through the proposed donor satisfaction barometer, show that service quality drives satisfaction, and donor satisfaction and organizational identification both exert significant positive effects on donor loyalty. Therefore, nonprofit organizations should use a combined strategic approach that improves both donor satisfaction and organizational identification to increase donor loyalty. The successful application of the donor satisfaction barometer also suggests its value for other nonprofit industries and offers important insights for managers.     

Resolving Accountability Ambiguity in Nonprofit Organizations

Accountability is a much studied subject in the social sciences and is known for its complexity, context dependence, and ambiguity. By conducting a comprehensive literature review and analysis across nonprofit, public, and private sector literatures, this article identifies the causes of ambiguities present in many accountability frameworks and describes the trend toward understanding accountability as a constructed concept combining both instrumental and interpretive elements. The relationship between legitimacy and accountability is considered. The authors develop a holistic accountability framework that facilitates defining and implementing accountability in complex, multi-stakeholder environments, by providing a means to operationalize commonly encountered but ambiguous accountability goals through a social process of deliberative dialogue. The authors conclude by summarizing limitations of the approach and describing future research needed.     

Structural Isomorphism in Australian Nonprofit Organizations

This paper assesses the extent of structural similarity or isomorphism among nonprofit organizations in Australia. Based on neo-institutional theory, the paper explains such isomorphism in terms of these organizations subordination and dependency, the uncertainties they face, and the networks of experts of which they are a part. The analysis uses the nonprofit component of a 2001–2002 random sample of Australian employment organizations. It finds surprisingly little isomorphism in this subsample and few differences in isomorphism according to the level of the factors thought to produce similarity. The discussion of the findings focuses on the suitability of the nonprofit sector as the appropriate organizational field within which isomorphism involving these organizations is likely to be produced. Industries, which include all organizations that produce the same product or service, be they nonprofit, for-profit, or government, may be more appropriate interactional fields for the development of isomorphism.     

Characteristics of Innovative Nonprofit Organizations in Argentina

The purpose of this study was to discover the characteristics of innovative organizations as perceived by employees of Argentine nonprofit organizations. The free listing technique, adapted from the field of cognitive anthropology, was used to achieve this task. Fifteen representatives of a variety of Argentinean nonprofit organizations participated in the study. Among the highest rated characteristics were: searching for new ways, solutions, and unconventional forms of work; adapting to new times; suggesting new forms for solving problems; and reflecting over organizational activities and actions. Rated as least characteristic were: encouraging role changes within teams; focusing on organizational mission; not being afraid of failure; and generosity (sharing information with other organizations).     

Change and Continuity in the Governance of Nonprofit Organizations in the United Kingdom: The Impact of Organizational Size

This article reports on the results of a survey of charities in England and Wales, which examined how their boards are changing and whether various external initiatives to improve board performance are having an effect. In particular, the research explored the impact of organizational size. The findings suggest that the size of the organization does matter, as a variety of board characteristics and changes vary with size. The article concludes by examining some of the implications of these findings for theory and practice.     

The Investment Returns of Nonprofit Organizations,Part I

Nonprofit charities and foundations hold endowments and many other kinds of investments. How do these investments perform? Some high‐profile nonprofit endowments, including those of colleges and universities, have been studied previously. This study is the first, to our knowledge, that looks at a large number of the diverse types of nonprofits. We investigate the determinants of investment performance using a large panel data set culled from the 990 forms that nonprofits must file annually with the IRS. In this first part of our article, we discuss our approach and the challenges of using these data to infer investment returns. The IRS data, though less than perfect, yield valuable measures of the investment returns of nonprofits. They reveal that some charities consistently do better in their investment returns than do others.     

Stability and Change in Nonprofit Organizations: The Volunteer Contribution

This paper reports on a study of the microprocesses of stability and change in a nonprofit welfare organization in Australia. We position volunteering and voluntarism as core constitutive phenomena in and of nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector more generally, and examine volunteer agency in action. Developing a model drawn from neoinstitutional theory and adopting an ethnographic approach, the paper illustrates theoretically and empirically how volunteers create and revise institutional orders operative within organizations in ways hitherto poorly articulated and understood.     

The Philanthropic Consequence of Government Grants to Nonprofit Organizations

Do government grants displace or leverage private donations to nonprofit organizations? Although research on this topic is flourishing, the findings remain extremely contradictory, creating difficulty in developing a cumulative knowledge available to scholars and practitioners. This study employs a meta‐analysis to systematically synthesize the competing findings from the existing literature. Using a sample of sixty original studies with 637 effect sizes, this study finds government grants have almost no correlation with private donations. In addition, this study demonstrates, through meta‐regression, that nonprofit subsector variation, organizational age as a control, longitudinal data structure, and endogeneity correction help explain the effect size heterogeneity within and across original studies. Nonprofits should be more concerned about the capacity of competing for different funding sources rather than the tradeoff among them.     

The Investment Returns of Nonprofit Organizations,Part II

We continue our examination of the investment performance of nonprofit charities and foundations. This analysis tests hypotheses about what types of organizations do better. Our motivating intuition is that nonprofits with greater focus on investment performance will secure higher returns. Our hypotheses are tested by regressing the rate of return for each organization on various characteristics. As expected, nonprofits whose primary business is predominantly financial, such as insurance providers and pension or retirement funds, consistently earn higher returns. The data also support our hypotheses that larger nonprofits, older nonprofits, and private foundations will tend to outperform. The evidence is mixed as to whether nonprofits that pay higher executive salaries or spend more on management earn higher returns.     

The Profile of Board Membership in Israeli Voluntary Organizations

This study of 161 nonprofit organizations in Israel was aimed at exploring the composition of boards, the methods employed to recruit new board members, and the selection criteria of board members. The results suggest that boards tend to be closed, elitist circles. Most organizations use mainly informal means to recruit new board members. The most important selection criteria were those related to interpersonal relationships, willingness to contribute time, and expressing an interest in working for the organization.     

The Role of Nonprofit Management Support Organizations in Sustaining Community Collaborations

This articles uses case studies to explore the theory that nonprofit management support organizations (MSOs) should consider taking on the role of convener and facilitator of community collaborations. They can do this work by facilitating planning and change and providing data to inform decisions about how to improve communities. In acting as a community support organization, their primary mission would be to build the capacity of all sectors to work together to solve social problems rather than simply to build the management capacity of individual nonprofit organizations.     

Dimensions of Capacity in Nonprofit Human Service Organizations

The purpose of this paper is to present and develop a firmer grasp of the underlying dimensions of organizational capacity in nonprofit human service organizations. The paper draws on the resource-based view of the organization (Barney et al. in Journal of Management 37:1299, 2011; Wernerfelt in Strategic Management Journal 5:171, 1984), which recognizes that organizational attributes and capabilities facilitate performance. Interviews were conducted with 66 executives in moderate sized, human service organizations to discuss factors that influence performance. Findings suggest that human, financial, and social capital all contribute to organizational performance. Executives emphasized the quality of people associated with the organization including the role of the board of directors in supporting performance. Many respondents also believed that maintaining healthy and dynamic external relationships was critical to success.     

Organizational Antecedents of Pay-for-Performance Systems in Nonprofit Organizations

The applicability of pay-for-performance systems (PfP-systems) in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) is discussed controversially both in literature and in practice. Existing theoretical models emphasize the importance of the employee’s motivation and output control for the effectiveness of PfP-systems. However, empirical evidence on which factors influence PfP-system’s introduction in NPOs is still lacking. Based on an exploratory study of nine Austrian NPOs, this paper develops hypotheses on what organizational factors distinguish NPOs that rely on PfP-systems for managing employees’ performance differences from those that use alternative approaches (e.g., job enrichment, NPO-spirit). Findings suggest that decisions on the application of PfP-systems are influenced by five determinants: perceived degree of competitiveness regarding funding and service provision; degree of strategic freedom; clarity of strategic objectives; existence of management instruments; and organizational culture.