Consumers use warmth and competence, two fundamental dimensions that govern social judgments of people, to form perceptions of firms. Three experiments showed that consumers perceive nonprofits as ...being warmer than for‐profits but as less competent. Further, consumers are less willing to buy a product made by a nonprofit than a for‐profit because of their perception that the firm lacks competence. Consequently, when perceived competence of a nonprofit is boosted through subtle cues that connote credibility, discrepancies in willingness to buy disappear. In fact, when consumers perceive high levels of competence and warmth, they feel admiration for the firm—which translates to consumers’ increased desire to buy. This work highlights the importance of consumer stereotypes about nonprofit and for‐profit companies that, at baseline, come with opposing advantages and disadvantages but that can be altered.
This article proposes a research program with two goals: (a) to support nonprofit leaders to productively engage evaluation and (b) to advance a meso-level theory of nonprofit evaluation that ...recognizes the diverse ways nonprofits contribute to social change. Such a research program is timely, as evaluation becomes increasingly institutionalized in the sector in ways that constrain nonprofit leaders from engaging productively with evaluation to advance their social impact. This research program brings existing nonprofit scholarship into conversation with evaluation scholarship and puts forward a research agenda organized around the practical dilemmas facing nonprofit leaders as they answer four key evaluation questions: what to evaluate, for what purpose, using which criteria, and with what evidence and methods. By anchoring a research program around these four questions, we seek to reopen the possibilities for how scholars can support nonprofit leaders in engaging evaluation to enhance their social impact.
A healthcare provider faces two decision problems. On the one hand, it chooses its organizational form: a hospital can be a for‐profit institution providing compensated care only, or it can be a ...nonprofit organization whose mission is enhancing access to care for uninsured, low‐income patients. On the other hand, the provider chooses which health professionals to hire, without observing their heterogeneous skills and their pro‐social motivation. These decisions are related because an increase in the percentage of revenues, that the nonprofit hospital sacrifices for charity care, might enhance the motivation of its workers and induce some of them to donate their labor, that is, to volunteer. Accordingly, this article analyzes the provider's optimal screening contracts, which are contingent on workers' ability and satisfy limited liability, and relates them to the optimal choice of its mission‐orientation. The results provide a new rationale for: a the emergence of different organizational forms for hospitals, such as for‐profits and nonprofits, which complement public hospitals in the provision of health care, b the heterogeneity in the degree of charity care chosen by different nonprofit hospitals.
The literature on nonprofit governance and boards has grown substantially during the past 50 years as researchers from a variety of disciplines and fields have studied governance systems and ...processes to examine how they are organized, the practices they employ, and their relations with and impacts on nonprofits. This essay offers a domain-based narrative review of the research on the governance of nonprofit organizations and how it has developed over these 50 years. Building on literature reviews and a Delphi study, we summarize the progression of nonprofit governance research, employ a multi-dimensional framework to summarize and assess the state of the field, and offer recommendations for future study. We find the increasingly multinational and multicultural literature of the field has become more rich, nuanced, and increasingly inclusive of contingency, complexity, paradox, and the diverse theoretical perspectives that will enhance our understanding of nonprofit governance.
Collaborative Value Creation Austin, James E.; Seitanidi, M. May
Nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly,
10/2012, Volume:
41, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This focused review of the nonprofitbusiness collaboration and related corporate social responsibility literature identifies problematic aspects of the treatment of value creation and, therefore, ...develops a conceptual and analytical framework to address them and the following research question: How can collaboration between nonprofits and businesses most effectively co-create significant economic, social, and environmental value for society, organizations, and individuals? The first two components of the Collaborative Value Creation framework are presented in this first of two articles The Value Creation Spectrum provides new reference terms for defining and analyzing value creation, and Collaboration Stages reveals how value creation varies across different types of collaborative relationships. The framework’s next two components, which are elaborated in the sequential article, are Partnering Processes, which reveals the value creation dynamics in the formation and implementation stages, and Collaboration Outcomes, which examines impact at the micro, meso, and macro levels.
Despite an increasing number of executives who transition from for-profit to not-for-profit organizations, our understanding of how commercially imprinted managers navigate the new setting remains ...limited. We collected data in the form of biographical interviews and observations with managers who had previously held a leading position in a commercial company and moved to work for a not-for-profit organization. We offer a typology of three responses that commercially imprinted managers used and identify conditions related to individuals’ biographies that facilitate the use of such responses, including social sector engagement, hybridity in previous job positions, international exposure, volunteering, and a diverse network.
By now, the becoming business-like of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) is a well-established global phenomenon that has received ever-growing attention from management and organization studies. ...However, the field remains hard to grasp in its entirety, as researchers use a multitude of similar, yet distinct, key concepts. The considerable range and complexity of these overlapping notions create major challenges: Scholars struggle to position their work in a larger context; it is not easy to build on previous findings and methodological developments; and research gaps are difficult to identify. The present article presents the first systematic literature review to confront those challenges by reviewing 599 relevant sources. In a first step, various key concepts are clarified. Second, the field is mapped according to three research foci: causes of NPOs becoming business-like, organizational structures and processes of becoming business-like, and effects of becoming business-like. From this, we draw conclusions and make suggestions for further research.
We document a market failure to fully respond to loss/profit quarterly announcements. The annualized post portfolio formation return spread between two portfolios formed on extreme losses and extreme ...profits is approximately 21 percent. This loss/profit anomaly is incremental to previously documented accounting-related anomalies, and is robust to alternative risk adjustments, distress risk, firm size, short sales constraints, transaction costs, and sample periods. In an effort to explain this finding, we show that this mispricing is related to differences between conditional and unconditional probabilities of losses/profits, as if stock prices do not fully reflect conditional probabilities in a timely fashion.
The purpose of our study is to broaden the investigation of nonprofit misconduct beyond financial fraud perpetrated by individual actors and to identify structural features that are more or less ...likely to be associated with actual misconduct. We utilize the Charity Navigator Advisory System and related press releases to identify 215 nonprofit organizations with confirmed or alleged misconduct. We also collect the IRS Form 990 information for 133 out of the 215 organizations with known misconduct and 150 organizations without known misconduct to compare their accountability structures. Our findings suggest that, while financial fraud committed by individual perpetrators against their organizations is the most frequently identified type of misconduct, a substantial number of other types of misbehaviors also commonly occur. Our comparison analysis indicates that organizations with known misconduct deviate significantly from scandal-free charities in several structural aspects.
This research note identifies seven key dimensions of the nonprofit sector that nonprofit stakeholders want to monitor to assess the sector’s condition, including financial resources; human ...resources; the diversity of nonprofit boards, staff, and clients; the impact of the nonprofit sector; advocacy activity; ethical and legal behavior; and the existence of a supportive environment. The article then describes current measures of these dimensions, noting the shortcomings of many of these measures. Two government data sources, the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), are highlighted that contain timely information about the nonprofit sector but which, to date, have been underutilized by sector stakeholders. Next, the article describes the picture of the nonprofit sector that emerges from the relevant measures before concluding with discussion of further work needed to improve measurement of the sector.
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