Abstract
Although the widely used Competing Values Framework (CVF) has attracted considerable attention in the literature and has proven useful as an approach to organizational effectiveness, we know little about how it applies to voluntary organizations. We therefore combined CVF with rigorous action research methodology to analyze the organizational effectiveness of Right in the Community (RitC), a voluntary agency serving the developmentally disabled. As our results show, CVF’s three dimensions of organizational focus, structural preference, and managerial concern helped us improve the organization’s management of scarce resources, organizational structure and governance, and innovative capabilities. During the collaboration, we also observed tensions between heart and head that were particularly relevant for improving organizational effectiveness at RitC. We therefore propose extending CVF for voluntary organizations with a fourth dimension: motivational trait.
Keywords
Introduction
For the past 50 years, the voluntary agency Right in the Community (RitC) has weathered turbulent shifts in funding and service opportunities in its effort to make life better for the developmentally disabled in Cobb County, Georgia. With just four paid administrative staff, RitC relies heavily on volunteers and government funding. Under conditions similar to other voluntary organizations, RitC has faced challenges related to management of scarce resources including volunteer recruitment, screening, and retention; governance and board effectiveness; and innovative processes and capabilities. To survive and continue fulfilling its mission, RitC has repeatedly reinvented itself and the services it offers. Now, as one board member put it, they once again found themselves “in a bit of a holding pattern,” trying to determine the best path forward in uncertain times.
To help RitC diagnose this problematic situation and improve its performance through deliberate intervention, we collaborated with its staff and board on an 8-month project using rigorous action research methodology (Susman & Evered, 1978; Van de Ven, 2007). Given the multifaceted nature of voluntary organizations, we chose to combine action research with the Competing Values Framework (CVF; Quinn & Cameron, 1983; Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983), a widely used, multidimensional model that assisted us in improving RitC’s organizational effectiveness by examining its operation along three key dimensions—organizational focus, structural preference, and managerial concern—and the specific tensions that typically emerge in each.
We engaged RitC’s stakeholders through workshops and interviews, studying archival data, and observing people at work. Based on these experiences, we developed, debated, and implemented interventions to improve the organization’s effectiveness. As our study shows, CVF was highly useful in helping RitC identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. Through this process, our engagement also suggested we should extend CVF’s existing three dimensions to include a fourth dimension, motivational trait, to capture the competing values of head and heart that often govern behaviors and choices in voluntary organizations. Such an extension of CVF is in line with Beres and Wilson’s (1997) call to develop “organization theory that recognizes the intrinsic importance in emotions, rather than the conventional approach of adapting to obliterate or rationalize them.”
Improving Voluntary Organizations
The literature distinguishes between voluntary groups in which volunteers operate as an organizational unit, voluntary agencies in which volunteers cooperate with paid personnel, and voluntary community organizations that are geographically based, volunteer-driven, locally initiated, and human scale entities formed to address crucial problems (Florin & Wandersman, 1990; Wilderom & Miner, 1991). Adapting the structural and operational approach recommended by Salamon and Anheier (1992), we define nonprofit and voluntary organizations as formal, nongovernmental (in structure), self-governing, and nonprofit distributing entities with some meaningful degree of participation by volunteers.
As formal, private, and self-governing entities, voluntary organizations share many similarities with for-profit organizations in terms of goals, service delivery, management, and rhetoric (Dart, 2004). Yet, they are also unique because of their not-for-profit missions and their dependence on volunteers. In such a context, there is no one “best practice.” Instead, improving organizational effectiveness depends on the use of appropriate management practices and on aligning those practices with the organization’s values, mission, stakeholder expectations, and context (Herman & Renz, 1999, 2008). This, in turn, requires attention to how scarce resources are managed, including the volunteers; how the organization is structured, including the board; and how the organization strategizes and supports innovation.
Voluntary organizations often lack staff, time, funding, a clear marketing message, and basic marketing knowledge, and they tend to suffer from low brand recognition and imprecise target marketing to clients, customers, volunteers, donors, and funding organizations (Pope, Isel, & Asamoa-Tutu, 2009). Due to this scarcity of resources, recruiting, selecting, and retaining volunteers are essential to organizational effectiveness, particularly during times of eroding social capital (Putnam, 1995). As a result, voluntary organizations must focus on why individuals volunteer and match those benefits to the organization’s needs (Bussell & Forbes, 2006). Moreover, managers must create realistic expectations among volunteers about the organization’s situation and clearly present the duties they are expected to perform (Kim, Trail, Lim, & Kyoum, 2009), and, to achieve higher commitment levels, managers need to regularly acknowledge volunteers’ membership and contributions (van Vuuren, de Jong, & Seydel, 2008).
A voluntary organization’s effectiveness also depends on how its activities are organized and governed, including the effectiveness of its board (Herman & Renz, 1999, 2008, Jansen & Kilpatrick, 2004). Although it may be debated exactly how, several factors influence board effectiveness including clear roles and responsibilities, appropriate mix of skills and experience, sufficient availability of time, a common vision with management, and periodic reviews of the board–management collaboration (Cornforth, 2001).
Finally, due to the ever-changing political and funding arena, organizations such as RitC need innovation to remain vibrant and responsive (McDermott & O’Connor, 2002). To do this, managers must explicate strategic direction; be sensitive to their internal and external environment; proactively shape their institutional context; and select the appropriate type of innovation (total, evolutionary, development, or expansionary; Osborne & Flynn, 1997). According to Kramer and Grossman (1987), political advocacy, resource expansion, interagency collaboration, service delivery modifications, entrepreneurial management, and staff reduction are among the activities managers must perform to facilitate strategic direction. These activities combine, utilize, align, and balance the organization’s human, relational, and structural capital, as well as the knowledge that flows between them (Kong, 2010).
CVF: A Model for Improving Effectiveness
While other theoretical frameworks such as ambidexterity (O’Reilly & Tushman, 2008), dynamic capabilities (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000), or balanced scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 1992) could have served as the framework to guide and explain organizational development at RitC, we agree with Herman and Renz (1999) that effectiveness is not an independent, abstract notion but rather “socially created by the actions and interactions of stakeholders” (p. 109). As such and given voluntary organizations’ exceptional need to balance the constant tension of values created by their diverse stakeholders, we used CVF’s notion of organizational effectiveness to analyze and improve the problematic situation at RitC. Although we identified no studies in the literature that investigated CVF in the context of voluntary organizations, we found the framework a useful tool in helping RitC more effectively meet the cultural, social, political, environmental, and human needs in their communities.
Effectiveness in voluntary organizations is a multidimensional concept (Herman & Renz, 1999), and addressing such complexity is an essential component of CVF (Quinn & Cameron, 1983; Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983). CVF has been used extensively to investigate organizational effectiveness in various areas and industries, including nonprofits (Herman & Renz, 2008), higher education institutions (Obendhain & Johnson, 2004), emergency departments (Tregunno, Baker, Barnsley, & Murray, 2004), management information systems (Cooper & Quinn, 1993), employment services organizations (Rohrbaugh, 1981), and different industries in Qatar (Al-Khalifa & Aspinwall, 2001). Indeed, in comparing approaches to organizational effectiveness, Rojas (2000) concluded that CVF was the most comprehensive and widely used approach, offering high confidence measures across sectors (Berrio, 2003; Egri & Herman, 2000; Gifford, 2002; Marshall, Mannion, Nelson, & Davies, 2003; Obendhain & Johnson, 2004; O’Connor, 2009; Shilbury & Moore, 2006).
CVF analyzes organizational effectiveness along three competing value dimensions. Along the external–internal dimension, the organization might focus externally, emphasizing its function and development within a larger environment, or focus internally, emphasizing the function and development of people within the organization. Along the control–flexibility dimension, the organization might emphasize control, focusing on structure, predictability, and stability; or emphasize flexibility, focusing on innovation and adaptability. Finally, along the means–goals dimension, managers might be means-oriented, emphasizing processes, planning, and goal setting; or goal-oriented, emphasizing outcomes, deliverables, and productivity. Although the values are conceptually opposite and paradoxical in nature, they are not empirically opposite—nor are they mutually exclusive in practice.
Initially, we analyzed RitC through the three competing value dimensions: external–internal, control–flexibility, and means–goals (Quinn & Cameron, 1983; Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983). During our 8-month action research engagement at RitC, however, we determined a fourth “head–heart” dimension was helpful in recognizing the important role played by the interdependent nature of cognition and affect in directing the attitudes and behaviors within this voluntary organization. In facing challenges, we observed stakeholders were motivated both by the head, with behaviors rooted in conceptualizations and driven by problem solving, collaboration, and competition; and by the heart, with behaviors rooted in consciousness and driven by compassion, generosity, and idealism (Maccoby, 1978). Indeed, behaviorists recognize few if any work-related behaviors can be fully understood without taking into account both cognition and affect (Forgas & George, 2001; Zajonc, 2000). Thus, we extended CVF to include an important fourth dimension, motivational trait (Table 1).
Extended Competing Values Framework.
Research Design, Data Collection, and Analysis
Formed in 1956, RitC has undergone several transformations in response to the changing needs of the developmentally disabled. Initially focused on education, RitC shifted toward providing day care and respite care, and later, toward group homes. From 1999 to 2003, it offered client coordination and monitoring, but dropped this service (and its 42 employees) when the state outsourced the services to statewide providers rather than contracting with regional organizations such as RitC. In response to this changing environment, RitC’s management and board had been discussing new directions for a few years but had yet to achieve an actionable strategy.
To obtain firsthand insights into RitC’s challenges and opportunities, we collected data from multiple sources during our 8-month study, including collaborative workshops, field observations, board meetings, archival surveys and documents, websites, and semi-structured interviews. We transcribed, recorded, and coded the interviews and workshops, using a coding scheme based on the extended CVF as presented in Table 1.
Organized as a qualitative case study (Yin, 2009), our research had a dual purpose: (a) to help the agency improve its management of scarce resources, organizational structure and governance, and innovative capabilities, and (b) to understand how CVF can support development within voluntary organizations. Because we wanted to solve a current practical problem while advancing scientific knowledge (Myers, 2009), we adopted a rigorous action research methodology (Rapoport, 1970; Susman & Evered, 1978; Van de Ven & Poole, 1995). Action research is used within multiple areas of organization and management studies (Coughlan & Coghlan, 2002; Eden & Huxham, 1996; Mathiassen, Chiasson, & Germonprez, 2012; Perry & Gummesson, 2004) when researchers seek deep insights into organizational practices through close collaboration with involved stakeholders (Mathiassen, 2002; Van de Ven, 2007). Accordingly, we engaged RitC’s management, staff, and board members in a cyclical, four-step process of appreciation, diagnosis, debate, and intervention (Checkland, 1981; Susman & Evered, 1978). The dual cycles of problem solving and research in action research (McKay & Marshall, 2001) enabled us to help RitC engage in organization development while testing and extending CVF’s usefulness in the context of voluntary organizations. Although we present the action research steps in a linear and sequential manner, the process itself was iterative.
Appreciation
From January through March 2010, RitC managers attended three monthly workshops in which they presented information on the organization’s internal and external operations based on the three-dimensional CVF framework we provided them. To further appreciate RitC’s challenges and opportunities, we reviewed pertinent documents and literature; visited the respite home, a group home, and two adult day care facilities; attended the annual awards banquet and two board meetings; and conducted interviews with the board president, a board member, a high-functioning, developmentally disabled client, and the director of Georgia Community Support and Solutions, a competitor that also provides local services to the developmentally disabled.
Diagnosis
The appreciation phase provided the basis for a collaborative diagnosis of RitC’s practical concerns. In a March 2010 workshop, we used CVF’s three dimensions of organizational focus, structural preference, and managerial concern to present our observations and assessments to management in three key operational areas: innovation, resources, and organization. We also presented action opportunities and recommendations to support RitC’s organizational development.
Debate
Throughout the first 3 months, we discussed and debated our observations, assessments, action opportunities, and recommendations with RitC management and select board members, and later, with the full board. By March 2010, we collaboratively identified, prioritized, and selected improvement activities. These activities emphasized two goals: operational efficiency, focusing on how RitC managed its core services, such as respite care and volunteer management; and organizational identity, focusing on RitC’s service profile and ability to plan for the future. Simultaneously, we evaluated the application of CVF, which resulted in the discovery of the need for a fourth dimension, motivational traits, to focus on the competing values of head and heart when evaluating a voluntary organization’s effectiveness.
Intervention
In June 2010, we held the next series of workshops, collaborating with managers to achieve operational efficiencies in their respite care and volunteer management activities. At the July 2010 board meeting, we recommended several steps for improving RitC’s organizational identity. These recommendations were debated and adopted, and at the August 2010 meeting, RitC formed a task force to implement them.
Intervention Informed By CVF
Our recommendations to RitC’s top management and board were based on our collaboration with RitC’s management in which we applied CVF’s lenses of organizational focus, structural preference, and managerial concern to diagnose three key areas: management of scarce resources, organizational structure and governance, and innovative capabilities.
Management of Scarce Resources
Like most organizations, RitC has struggled to acquire and more efficiently utilize financial, physical, and human resources. “Things we are doing are not generating income,” lamented the Director. “Cash flow is always a problem.” Financially, RitC’s primary revenue sources have been grants, service fees, investment income, contributions, membership dues, and fund-raising efforts, which were primarily centered on an annual golf tournament. To secure these resources, RitC’s management focus has been incessantly external. Indeed, RitC’s identity long depended on its formal relationship with an external national organization, Association for Retarded Citizens (ARC), an identity that was lost when its name changed from ARC Cobb to RitC in 2007 as a result of a formal break with the national organization.
RitC’s ongoing resource struggle was also reflected in its cramped and technologically inefficient office facilities, where staff were not even linked by a common computer network. Furthermore, with only four paid administrative staff members, RitC has depended heavily on volunteers and, as a result, has maintained a low, flexible structure. The volunteers have varied widely in skills, abilities, and availability. “Some community service volunteers just want to complete their hours and get out,” said the Director, “and other volunteers can be very helpful, but also demanding and annoying.” Faced with this uncertainty in human resources, management has focused on the organization’s day-to-day operation and has had time for little else.
To improve resource management, we recommended redirecting the primary fund-raising responsibilities from management to a board-led task force, establishing a 1-year goal to upgrade the office facilities through a board–management task force, and improving volunteer recruitment, selection, management, and rewards, including matching needed tasks and duties with volunteer skills and abilities, and giving the volunteer management responsibilities to the Assistant Director.
Organizational Structure and Governance
Given its small size, RitC had a surprisingly complex organization. Due to limited funding, RitC’s paid staff included only the four administrative workers and six respite care workers. To operate its 20 group homes, RitC relied on hundreds of volunteers and collaborative relationships with five other agencies. It also had 24 board members and more than 200 overall members. RitC’s ultimate clients are the developmentally disabled, but to serve them, management must satisfy the needs and requirements of caregivers, members, board members, federal agencies (such as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development), state agencies (such as the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities), and local governmental authorities for development and operation of group and respite homes. “Who are really our customers?” asked one board member. “I think it’s hard for the board to understand what we are supposed to be providing.”
These complexities have further reinforced RitC’s low, flexible structure; its dominant external focus; and its preoccupation with means. Yet, in particular areas, RitC provided simple and relatively predictable services—such as respite care and maintenance of group homes—that would benefit from more structure and a greater internal focus. As a result, we worked with management to separate concerns between RitC areas (a) requiring tighter control, internal focus, and means orientation (the core services, including respite care, group home maintenance, and volunteer management) and (b) requiring flexibility, external focus, and ends orientation (such as innovation of identity and service profile). In the core services, we worked with management to break down services into steps and to implement improvements to each step. As previously mentioned, we also recommended shifting the shared responsibility of those services to the Assistant Director and conducting a regular, annual review of internal processes with staff and management. Commenting on the implemented changes to respite care, the Assistant Director remarked, “It has created a positive impact for us, and it has also created a positive experience for the parents” of RitC’s developmentally disabled clients. For innovation, we recommended creating management-board task forces that would more effectively leverage the time, talents, and abilities of the Director and board to achieve mutually determined goals; establish a smaller, five-member executive board to assist the Director on daily operational issues; and move RitC away from its membership-based structure because the resources required to manage members were far exceeding the benefits.
Innovative Capabilities
Since its inception in 1956, RitC has innovated and adapted to its turbulent environment by remaining externally focused and by leveraging its small size and a low, flexible structure. Hence, for more than 50 years, the organization has endured abrupt, episodic changes in governmental funding methods and priorities. At each juncture, RitC’s management has dropped, modified, and added services to survive and thrive. Initially created as an agency dedicated to advocacy and education, in 1965, RitC shifted its focus to day care and respite care when the Title VI to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave the Cobb County public school system the responsibility of educating the developmentally disabled. Later, the Low-Income Housing Preservation and Resident Homeownership Act of 1990 gave RitC the opportunity to develop group homes. RitC added client coordination and monitoring services in 2003 but terminated the activity in 2007 when the service became state-contracted. From there, it gradually evolved to its current focus on providing respite care for caregivers, group home building and maintenance, and referral, informational, and advocacy services. Acknowledging the present uncertainty, one board member said RitC was now “in a little bit of a holding pattern, waiting for the next generation of services it might need to perform.”
Throughout its dynamic history, RitC managers have focused on means rather than ends, primarily relying on the RitC Director’s ad hoc innovative efforts. Moreover, management’s attempts at formal, long-range planning were long bogged down by ongoing board discussions on how to establish a “one-stop” community center that never materialized. According to RitC’s Director, “long-range planning seems to get longer and longer with no end dates . . .. I just jump in and do things while we’re in the middle of long-range planning.” Therefore, to improve RitC’s organizational effectiveness, we recommended implementing a formalized, strategic planning process in which the management and board would collaborate. This formalized process included creating service-profile task forces as needed rather than having standing committees, developing a 3-year plan with specific goals each year, and redefining the roles and responsibilities between management and the board to more fully leverage the talents of the board and free the Director from fund-raising and certain day-to-day operational duties, thus letting her focus more strategically on RitC’s development.
The Importance of Motivational Traits
As our discussion shows, CVF’s three dimensions and corresponding competing values were invaluable tools in informing RitC’s organizational development. During the research process, however, a fourth dimension emerged that helped explain and further develop RitC’s organization and culture: the dimension of motivational traits, with the competing values of head and heart.
As is clear in the mission statement that hangs on its conference room wall, RitC is an organization dedicated to heart: “Right in the Community is committed to promoting opportunities for all people with developmental disabilities to live full, productive, self-determined lives of the highest quality, by fostering local communities which embrace all people.” RitC was created by a group of parents passionately dedicated to the education of their developmentally disabled children. As the Director described it, those parents were advocacy-oriented and militant, “wanting to throw shoes at the legislature.” Although no longer militant in its approach, RitC continues to describe itself as “family-centered,” “helpful,” and “compassionate.” According to RitC’s president, “we all work together because our ultimate goal is to help the people with disabilities and give them everything we possibly can . . .. We need to help those who cannot help themselves.” Moreover, noneconomic considerations have always dominated. In fact, as the Director noted, “management and the board have not really sat down and decided where to spend time to make money,” and it was evident that management had not analyzed which services were profitable. The Director, for example, estimated spending 70% of her time helping caregivers by providing referrals and information—a service for which there is currently no compensation. Also, in discussing ways to improve respite care, management summarily rejected the idea of eliminating laundry service because it did not want to hand families a bag of dirty laundry when they picked up their children. This was, after all, respite care. Similar feelings were expressed by one board member who referred to the management of group homes as “almost secondary to the benefit we get from having people in those homes.”
In short, the behaviors and, ultimately, the actions of RitC’s managers and board members have been and continue to be explained by a tension between the operational need for rational, problem-solving behaviors and a mission rooted in compassion and idealism. This tension between head and heart also helps explain the composition, actions, and number of RitC’s board members. All but 1 of the 24 board members have someone close to them—usually a son or daughter—who is developmentally disabled and uses RitC services. As a result, board meetings function in part as an informal support group. The group’s collective need for support is the primary reason for the large number of board members relative to the size of the organization. As one member stated about the motivation for being on the board, “in addition to contributing to a thriving organization, one of the main reasons is the camaraderie with the board members and management team . . . the exchange of stories, opinions, and advice.” So, when we recommended holding a small executive committee meeting monthly, management also decided to maintain the full board and change its structure and meeting schedule accordingly. Furthermore, the ongoing formation of RitC’s service profile has been tightly linked to board members’ personal situations and experiences. The RitC’s President’s brother, for example, is currently in one of its group homes. When their mother died, the President was suddenly left with the care of her brother. “It was one of the toughest times of our lives,” she said. “It was the biggest blessing when he moved into the group home.” As a result, she continues to be engaged in RitC and to advocate for building more group homes. In shaping RitC’s future service profile, therefore, we recommended that the organization consider both the personal and emotional needs of RitC board members as well as the general “market” needs of the developmentally disabled and their caregivers.
The role of heart is further accentuated by the long-term nature of relationships at RitC. Because RitC’s clients typically stay with the organization for many years, the management and the board become acquainted with and emotionally attached to them. The Director sends all clients personalized birthday cards, RitC has parties for clients, and the Director and her husband often take the clients to fairs and other outings. Any changes at RitC—whether in innovation, development, effectiveness, or efficiency—must recognize that RitC is not simply a voluntary organization; it is a network of caring individuals who are dedicated to serving each of the developmentally disabled client’s physical needs and adding “sparkle” to their lives. As one board member put it, “We see shortcomings and ask, ‘Isn’t there something more we can do to impact the quality of life for these clients?’”
Discussion
Like most voluntary organizations, RitC was “business-like” in some of its goals, as expressed in its rhetoric about service, delivery, and management (Dart, 2004). In its day-to-day operations, RitC management has toiled to procure resources through fund-raising and volunteer recruitment efforts; to efficiently use those resources to provide respite care, group home maintenance and development, and transportation services; and to meet the sometimes conflicting needs of a myriad of stakeholders, including the developmentally disabled and their caregivers, board and general members, and governmental agencies. RitC has differed, however, from its profit-oriented counterparts in being highly dependent on voluntary resources (Salamon & Anheier, 1992) and in its dynamic and demanding external environment created in part by government funding (Gronbjerg, 2001). Consequently, over the past 50 years, RitC has found itself facing not only “business-like” challenges but also challenges unique to voluntary organizations. These challenges have surfaced in RitC’s development as it has struggled with a lack of marketing resources and poor brand recognition (Pope et al., 2009) after rejecting its ARC affiliation; grappled with questions involving board size and mix, and the clarity of roles, responsibilities, and mission (Cornforth, 2001); strived to balance its volunteers’ needs with those of the organization (Bussell & Forbes, 2006); and developed ad hoc strategic thrusts aimed at adapting to ever-changing funding sources and a turbulent, external environment (Kramer & Grossman, 1987).
Analyzing RitC along the dimensions of CVF, we found RitC to be a voluntary organization externally focused on the larger social and economic world that it depended on for financial and human resources. To adapt to and innovate in this often unpredictable context, RitC’s structural preference evolved to be a flexible, low structure with few paid administrative workers, and to accomplish its mission, it utilized both volunteers and collaborative relationships with outside agencies. This environment of uncertain and scarce resources also resulted in management being concerned mainly with means and focused more on processes than outcomes, with a day-to-day emphasis on “getting the job done.”
In developing recommendations in collaboration with RitC’s management, we followed CVF and distinguished between RitC’s services and functions that are routine, predictable, and operational, and those that are adaptive, unpredictable, and innovative. In the first case—for services such as respite care, group home maintenance, and volunteer management—our recommendations centered on shifting the organizational focus internally toward its people and their activities; implementing a structure with a higher level of control; and shifting RitC’s managerial concern toward productivity and outcomes. In the latter case, there was a clear need to continue with an external organizational focus. We therefore recommended that RitC further increased structural flexibility by changing the board’s role and size and by eliminating the membership-based structure. To further develop these adaptive and innovative functions, we recommended a greater managerial focus on outcomes. Specifically, we suggested that management and the board collaborate in creating a 3-year plan with yearly goals to develop a consensus of RitC’s mission and a formalized strategy to achieve it.
However, during our action research process stages—appreciation, diagnosis, debate, and intervention (Checkland, 1981; Susman & Evered, 1978)—tensions between the competing values of head and heart emerged as particularly important in understanding and explaining RitC’s development. We therefore found it necessary to add motivational trait as a new dimension to CVF. Consistent with the literature on the cognitive and affective dimensions of organizational behavior (Forgas & George, 2001) and guided by Maccoby’s (1978) concepts, this dimension consists of the head, emphasizing behaviors rooted in conceptualizations and driven by problem solving, collaboration, and competition; and the heart, emphasizing behaviors rooted in consciousness and driven by compassion, generosity, and idealism. Given RitC’s altruistic mission; compassionate culture; and close, personal client interactions, understanding the competing values of head and heart was important in making sense of the organization’s history, assessing its current situation, and recommending future directions. Taking Beres and Wilson’s (1997) earlier call to develop theory that recognizes the intrinsic importance of emotions in voluntary organizations, we therefore propose extending CVF in this context with the dimension of motivational trait, as summarized in Table 1.
Conclusion
This action research study helped develop RitC’s identity, organization, management practices, and ability to plan for the future; it demonstrated the value of CVF for developing voluntary organizations with its three dimensions of organizational focus, structural preference, and managerial concern; and it led to an extension of CVF in this context with the added dimension of motivational trait and its competing values of head and heart.
Although our study was conducted over an 8-month period and relied on several rich data sources, it is nonetheless a single case study. Hence, the results might not be generalizable to all voluntary organizations, although they can be transferred to organizations with similar characteristics (Checkland, 1981; Yin, 2009). We further recognize that CVF is only one of several contemporary and helpful lenses for analyzing and understanding organizations. In future studies, alternative theoretical frameworks could provide additional valuable insights into key issues in improving the effectiveness of voluntary organizations, such as managerial decision making (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1972), strategic planning (Kaplan & Norton, 1992), dynamic capabilities (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000), and ambidexterity (O’Reilly & Tushman, 2008). Finally, in extending CVF to account for motivational traits, we relied on past research concerning the cognitive and affective dimensions of organizational behavior (Forgas & George, 2001) and Maccoby’s concepts of the competing values of head and heart. In further examining the role of emotions in voluntary organizations, concepts and ideas from authors such as Fineman (1993) may also prove beneficial.
Yet, our RitC study provides important implications for voluntary organizations with similar characteristics. Even for small organizations with limited resources, our study demonstrates it is possible to engage in systematic efforts to understand and improve their operations. The study also reveals the value of using CVF and its dimensions as a diagnostic tool for understanding and developing organizational effectiveness. Extending CVF to include the competing values of head and heart enhances its usefulness in the context of voluntary organizations by emphasizing the vital role of emotions in the evolution and development of these unique enterprises.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biographies
