Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

In the United States all legally incorporated non-profit organizations are required to have boards of directors. The members of these boards are unpaid volunteers. This paper examines the reasons board members participate. A triad of data collec tion techniques—questionnaires, interviews, and observations-was used to study the members of the boards of directors of ten human service agencies. The study is based on an incentive approach to participation, which suggests that participation occurs in response to incentives, the expectation of valued outcomes. Four catego ries of incentives-material, social, developmental, and ideological—are used to or ganize the data. The study demonstrates that board members have multiple and complex incentives for participation, that some members achieve an adequate num ber of incentives and some do not, that few members participate in response to in centives that are dependent on specific policy outcomes and that even fewer serve as consumer representatives, and that there are differences among agencies in board members' reasons for serving. Implications for board recruitment and retention are discussed.

Female volunteer directors are largely drawn from affluent professional and corpo rate families. Their role in the reproduction of the upper class has been overlooked by studies of class culture and class legitimation. This study argues that women who take on community leadership roles (volunteer directorships in particular) are motivated to do so because of class cultural incentives: noblesse oblige, duty to community and prestige. These combine with incentives for personal achievement in ways which, at once, serve to reproduce upper class prerogatives for community leadership roles and maintain the volunteer board status quo.

Citizen advisory boards are important to non-profit and governmental organiza tions, yet these boards face fundamental problems of ambiguous responsibilities and limited board member commitment. In the present paper a model of these proposi tions is developed and tested. Board performance is operationalized as productivity and board impact, and is expected to be dependent on the development of opera tional objectives and a subcommittee structure, which in turn is facilitated by the financial support of management, and impeded by a large board membership. The model is tested using path analysis on a national sample of federally-mandated Community Advisory Boards to public television stations. We find that the estab lishment of operational objectives and subcommittees is significantly associated with productivity but only weakly with the impact of the advisory board. Board size is unassociated with board performance. The findings support the assertion that successful boards must clarify their roles and develop efficient operating structures, but suggest that the advisory board-management relationship is complex.

Boards of directors perform both internal and external functions. After reviewing research on the external function, this paper reports the results of an empirical study of the internal role. Based upon responses from 142 people in seven private nonprofit organizations the study finds that: (1) participants experience less actual influence than they think they should have; (2) board members' influence is posi tively related to the frequency of board meetings and the extent to which board members feel informed of their duties, though neither is very strong; (3) ratings of organizational effectiveness are positively related to board member ratings of staff educational sufficiency and the extent to which board members feel informed of their duties; and (4) at the organizational level of analysis, organizational effective ness is strongly related to the amount of total influence in the organization though this result seems to be based mostly on the strong relation between the influence of the executive director and effectiveness, as effectiveness is unrelated to board influ ence and positively related to the difference in influence between the executive di rector and the board.

United Ways are local community-based fund raising and planning organizations that exist in most cities in the United States and Canada. The effectiveness of these organizations in fund raising for community agency services, varies from commu nity to community. This variation occurs even when the fund raising practices utilized by the organizations are similar. This article reports the results of a study that examined United Way organizations seeking to identify variables related to the governing boards that were unique to the organizations that achieved high fund raising results. The study sample consisted of four United Ways located in the mid-west. The results of the study indicated that certain board leadership variables were present in successful United Ways that were not present, or present to a lesser degree in less successful United Ways. These variables included attendance at board meetings, composition of the board, and length of residence in the community. Although the sample was limited to United Way organization the results of the study can have significance for any type of community-based nonprofit organiza tion.

There are a number of management roles that must be played if a nonprofit organi zation is to be successful. Drawing on the work of Mintzberg, ten managerial roles in nonprofit organizations are reviewed and prescriptions about the appropriate al location of each role between board and staff are advanced. Throughout, it is stres sed that recognition of the skills of the executive director and the responsibilities of the board of directors is critical for appropriately assigning the various functions. Finally, teamwork should be the ultimate goal of the board and staff in order to move the organization toward fulfilling its mission.

Expectations are one key component of the glue which holds an organization to gether. When expectations are not explicitly developed and clearly communicated, effective relations between board and staff are not likely. This article prescribes the basic expectations an effective board member should have, especially regarding key organizational factors such as: administration and management information, fiscal information, and human resource management. Fifteen specific questions are de scribed which will provide board members and the executive staff with one useful set of tools to insure effective communication of expectations.