Abstract Leaders of nonprofit organizations have challenging responsibilities of satisfying the demands of all their stakeholders by obeying state and federal regulations. Noncompliance of regulations can quickly cause a nonprofit organization to lose its tax exempt status and become nonexistent; thus, it appears that most nonprofits are choosing to prioritize compliance, while struggling to maintain focus on their mission and services. Using the conceptual framework of transformational leadership and general system theories, this case study was to explore strategies leaders of nonprofits organizations in Pennsylvania that cater to the needs of people with disabilities use for decreasing regulatory citations to maintain their tax-exempt status. The population for this study consisted of 5 leaders of a single nonprofit organization in Pennsylvania, who were purposefully selected with experience for managing nonprofit organizations prevent citations and maintain their tax-exempt status. I collected data through semistructured interviews and analyzed the data through inducive word phrase coding and theme interpretation. Five themes emerged from my analysis of the data: the use of rules as a guide for quality improvement, leadership focus on organizational strategy, teamwork, effective communication, and training, as a means of empowering and educating team members on organizational values and rules. This study contributes to positive social change by teaching nonprofit leaders’ various strategies for decreasing regulatory citations, fines, to maintain their tax-exempt status, and fulfill their social missions of providing needed services in communities.

Nonprofits need dedicated people to meet the mission of the organization and to address the social and societal conditions they were established to address. How are nonprofit organizations cultivating the next generation of leaders? With five generations of workers in the workplace, the field for new, nonprofit, board-level volunteers is large. However, research shows that young professionals and marginalized racial minorities are underrepresented or not represented in this area. Why is this our current reality and what is hindering the service of these leaders on nonprofit boards? This dissertation examines the role of representation in generational and racial terms on the board of directors of nonprofit organizations in South Carolina. / Business Administration/Human Resource Management

The longstanding framing of accountability in principal-agent terms has encouraged adversarial and oppositional interactions and ways of thinking amongst nonprofit and funding agency practitioners within government-nonprofit relationships. These interactions are deeply rooted in the accountability claims made by government funders and responded to by nonprofit practitioners. This dissertation outlines the implications of nonprofit-government contracting for participating nonprofit organizations and explores various strategies practitioners in those institutions utilize to respond to the challenges raised by their relationship to public funders. To understand the tensions surrounding government accountability claims, I provide an overview of the emergence of the contracting regime and an exploration of the understanding of accountability that has attended its evolution. Through an in-depth qualitative case study, constructed on the basis of interviews, observation, and document analysis and following a grounded theory approach to analysis, I explore various nonprofit manager responses to the norms and pressures of the contracting regime. I chronicle nonprofit practitioners\' responses to contracting regime pressures, including accepting those norms, even when arguably inimical to their organization\'s mission, ignoring them in favor of serving clients, or leaving the employ of organizations altogether. I also explore examples of practitioner efforts to navigate outside of the contracting regime\'s antagonistic framing and engage both with powerful stakeholders and others in their organizations to negotiate changes. Drawing on the theoretical lens of agonism, I examine the context and characteristics of those responses to provide insights into how nonprofit managers might move beyond antagonistic accountability frames. / Ph. D.

No description available.

This dissertation explores the relationship between governance quality, accumulated wealth, and organizational performance in U.S. nonprofits. Accumulated wealth in nonprofits has been previously shown to reduce overall support contributions because donors perceive less need for financial resources. Further, the absence of owners leads to weaker monitoring mechanisms and greater agency problems. Despite the size of the nonprofit sector (5.5% of GDP and 9% of employment), the impact of governance in organizations with accumulated wealth has not been studied much. Using recent data on governance practices at nonprofits reported on IRS Form 990’s and structural equation modeling/partial least squares analysis, this study finds that the strength of governance practices in nonprofits reduces the negative impact of accumulated wealth in Arts, Education, Environment, Health, Higher Education, Hospitals, Human Services, International, and Religious organizations. This paper demonstrates how agency theory and stakeholder theory complement each other when the nonprofit business model has a traditional revenue structure similar to its for-profit counterpart. For practitioners, it shows that combining a strong governing body, governing policies, compensation policies, and transparency policies, helps hold management accountable. This is necessary for the more efficient and effective execution of a nonprofit’s mission. / Business Administration/Finance

Univ., Diss.--Hamburg, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. 259 - 286.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / For nonprofit organizations, securing and sustaining funding is essential to survival. Many nonprofit managers see government funding as ideal because of its perceived security (Grønbjerg, 1993; Froelich, 1999). However, there is little evidence to support the claim that such funds actually make nonprofits more sustainable, and some research has even suggested that nonprofits receiving “fickle” government funds are more likely to fail (Hager et al., 2004). The primary purpose of this work is to examine the relationship between government funding and nonprofit failure. Its secondary purpose is to understand the relationships between failure, government funding, and the causes for failure suggested by previous research—instability of the funding source and low funding diversification. To examine these relationships, I chose to use survival analysis and employed the Cox regression technique. Here, I analyzed the NCCS-Guidestar National Nonprofit Research Database, which archives nonprofit IRS filings from 1998 to 2003. This data set is noteworthy for its level of detail and its comprehensive nature. I found that organizations receiving government funding are less likely to fail, especially if this funding is part of a balanced portfolio. Organizations with higher percentages of nonprofit funding and organizations with less diversified overall portfolios do not. Furthermore, nonprofit organizations with less diversified portfolios were more likely to fail, and, among organizations receiving government funding, those with the highest percentage of their revenue from the government were more likely to fail than their counterparts with less funding.

Chapter 1 raises the research question guiding this study. Do relationships that board members of nonprofits have to officials in other agencies affect the likelihood of acquiring grants? The objective of this study was to examine the role that relationship ties played in the nonprofit sector’s ability to receive grants. Chapter 2 ties the research agenda to existing research. Nonprofit organizational and financial behavior was explained in terms of resource dependence. Since nonprofit organizations face uncertainty in resource allocation, the behavior of the organization and the board members change in reaction to uncertainty. The relationships that board members possess serve as social capital for the nonprofit through a series of formal and informal ties. Chapter 3 provides a theoretical framework for measuring relationship ties as well as other variables to funding. Ties that were measured included previous work experience in government agencies, nonprofit agencies, for-profit organizations, and universities. Relationships ties also included previous appointment to a nonprofit board and membership in professional associations. Additional variables such as financial and organizational measures were considered that had an effect on funding likelihood. Expected funding then became a function of all of these variables. This framework led to the hypothesis that nonprofits with a greater number of relationship ties, controlling for appropriate variables, will receive more funds from a government agency. Chapter 4 describes the methods used. The sample of organizations included 176 nonprofit community healthcare organizations over the span of five fiscal years. Board member names, financial and organizational data, and relationship ties were collected as they were expected to affect funding outcomes. Information on relationships was obtained from three sources: LinkedIn profiles, Who’s Who profiles, and agency websites. Financial and organizational variables were obtained from nonprofit organizations’ 990 tax forms. Chapter 5 details the analyses and the results from the collected data. Conducted analyses included a series of multiple regressions, a probit regression, and fixed-effects and between-effects panel data regression models. The findings partially supported the hypothesis. While there were some relationship ties that were correlated to anticipated funding, the effects were small across analyses. Financial and organizational variables overshadowed the effects of relationship ties. There was evidence of mediation in that a number of variables were significant only if board members were in an organization receiving funds prior to the examined time period. Ties to other nonprofits mattered only when an agency already had funding. Chapter 6 concludes with possible explanations, policy implications, and further directions.

The field of nonprofit management education is nascent and little of the research has extended into the area of leadership as a requisite competency for nonprofit leaders. Likewise, the research on leadership has not been widely extended to the nonprofit sector. Prior research suggests a broad range of competencies are necessary to lead in the dynamic, complex environment of nonprofits, the exercise of which differs from that in the for-profit sector. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015 / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

zugl. Diss. Univ. St. Gallen, 2006. / Register. Literaturverz.