Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

Although nonprofit collaboration is commonplace, recent research suggests that faith-based organizations (FBOs) are less likely to collaborate than other nonprofits. This study builds on prior FBO, collaboration, and nonprofit capacity research to examine the influence of religiosity and operational capacity on FBOs’ within- and cross-sector partnerships. Findings from a survey with 197 FBOs across the United States reveal a complex picture of how religiosity and operational capacity influence FBO collaboration. More specifically, staff religiosity was positively related to cross-sector partnerships. Service religiosity (i.e., religious elements in staff–client interactions) was negatively associated with collaboration with government agencies. Results also indicated that FBOs with higher operational capacity had more partners in the nonprofit, business, and public sectors. These findings suggest that FBOs generally lack the operational capacity for collaboration and that service religiosity creates additional barriers to it. This article concludes with implications for research in FBOs, interorganizational collaboration, and nonprofit capacity.

Analyzing mission statements from 1,420 community foundations, this research aims to determine whether community foundations portray themselves as primarily transactional or transformational in their leadership style. Results indicate that approximately half of the community foundations present themselves as transformational dominant although about a third demonstrate transactional dominance. The well-established leadership categories of transformational and transactional (a) give us a new way to explore community foundations’ roles in their communities, (b) help us better understand the way community foundations perceive themselves and their leadership, and (c) provide a mechanism to assess how community foundations are presenting their missions to their communities. In addition, by examining organizations as the unit of analysis, this research answers long-standing calls in leadership studies to consider levels of analysis beyond the individual.

Evidence exists that beautiful is seen as good: the halo effect wherein more physically attractive people are perceived to be good, and the reverse halo that good is seen as beautiful. Yet research has rarely examined the evidence linking the beautiful with the good, or the reverse, without the halo effect. We examine the relationship between physical attractiveness (beauty) and giving behaviors (good), where ratings of attractiveness are independent of giving behaviors. We use three U.S. datasets: (a) a nationally representative sample of older adults (NSHAP), (b) a nationally representative longitudinal study of adolescents (ADD Health), and (c) the 54-year Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), to present evidence that these two characteristics (attractiveness and giving) are indeed correlated without the halo effect. We find a ‘good-looking giver’ effect–that more physically attractive people are more likely to engage in giving behaviors, and vice versa. Thus, in ecologically valid real-world samples, people who do good are also likely to look good.

Although considerable research has developed exploring effective management of nonprofit boards of directors, there is limited understanding of the motivations of nonprofit board members to serve on boards. Using a sample of nearly 700 nonprofit board members, this study examines antecedent conditions and dimensions of public service motivation (PSM) as they apply to nonprofit board members and the differences in levels of PSM between board members who have worked primarily in the nonprofit, public, or private sectors. Board members with primary employment in the public sector show the highest levels of PSM. This study illustrates that nonprofit board members who work in the private sector exhibit fewer values associated with public service motivation. Other variables that predict public service motivation among board members include gender, level of education, and formal volunteering activity, among several others.

Volunteers and paid staff frequently work alongside each other in nonprofit organizations. Nevertheless, the possible impact of volunteering on the wages of the paid staff has hardly ever been investigated due to the scarcity of data suited to such research. Based on the matching of two French databases and using several indicators relating to volunteering, this article examines the relationship between volunteering and wages by carrying out investigations that differentiate between employees depending on their position in the socio-occupational hierarchy and the field of activity of their organizations. The results confirm the value of such an approach based on disaggregated data by revealing the diversity of situations. This diversity ranges from some cases where no relationship is observed between volunteering and wages to others where there is a negative relationship and even in a few cases, a positive one.

Nudging techniques can help charities to increase donations. In this article, we first provide a systematic overview of prototypical nudges that promote charitable giving. Second, we argue that plenty of the ethical objections raised against nudges, such as the exploitation of power they involve and the arguably intrusive and deceptive nature, are not specific to nudging itself. Carefully designing nudges can help to avoid these worries. Third, given that most concerns boil down to the worry that nudges infringe on people’s autonomy, we analyze when this could nevertheless be justified. We differentiate between perfect duties, imperfect duties, and supererogatory acts and argue that nudges are (a) morally permissible (even when they violate autonomy) when it comes to perfect duties and can (b) provide the best available strategy when it comes to imperfect duties. That said, we also analyze the conditions under which nudging charitable giving is impermissible.

Facilitating political engagement is a vital function of the nonprofit sector. While some public charities engage in political activities like policy advocacy, many focus exclusively on their core service mission. Current nonprofit research does not adequately theorize the inherent tension between service and advocacy activities. We conceptualize nonprofits engaging in service and advocacy as hybrid organizations that incorporate two distinct logics. Using the organizational hybridity literature, and empirical data from a survey of Massachusetts nonprofits, we examine how the logics of service provision and political advocacy are combined and managed across a sample of nonprofits. We find that nonprofit service–advocacy hybrids adopt an array of organizational structures to accommodate these logics, including decoupled, segregated, outsourced, and blended structures. Our results suggest that compartmentalization may be a common strategy and that certain organizational structures are related to the presence of mission integration, funding reliance, competition, and advocacy objectives.

Nonprofit overhead ratios (i.e., proportion of funds spent on fundraising and/or management) have long been used as a proxy for nonprofit efficiency. Prior studies find that donors negatively respond to charities with higher overhead. Using a survey experiment, we explore whether providing different types of information about overhead alleviates this donor aversion. When asked to choose between two organizations as donation recipients, donors preferred the organization with lower overhead. However, when presented with information that described the purpose of higher overhead as building long-term organizational capacity, an increased proportion of donors chose to give to the organization with higher overhead. Omitting the word “overhead” further increased the proportion of donors choosing the organization with higher overhead. This study adds to our understanding of overhead aversion and has practical implications for nonprofits that rely on voluntary private contributions to achieve their missions.

In response to the large number of definitions of social enterprise (SE), various works have sought to cope with such diversity through SE typologies. Many of them are however country-specific and only very few of them are built upon solid theoretical foundations. To overcome these weaknesses, Defourny and Nyssens had put forward, in a previous article, some fundamentals for an international typology, including four SE models. The objective of the present article is to test the existence of these models on the basis of a data set covering 721 SEs and resulting from a survey carried out in 43 countries. More precisely, the statistical exploitation of the data set combined multiple factorial analysis with hierarchical cluster analysis. It appears that the existence of three of the four SE models—namely the social-business model, the social-cooperative model and the entrepreneurial nonprofit model—is strongly supported by the empirical analysis in almost all surveyed countries.

Recent high-profile scandals suggest the potential for a crisis of trust in charities, which could have negative consequences for the nonprofit sector as a whole. Although widespread, this crisis narrative has not yet been subjected to empirical examination. To assess the extent to which public trust has changed over time, we examined trust in nongovernmental organizations within 31 countries over nine consecutive years using data from the Edelman Trust Barometer (N = 294,176). Multilevel analysis revealed that, after allowing for differences in absolute levels of trust and trends across countries, there was actually a small increase in global trust in the nonprofit sector. This increase was sharper among men, people aged below 40 years, and people with higher education, income, and media consumption. Overall, we find no evidence of a crisis of trust in nonprofits; scandals within individual organizations have not affected sectoral trust.

Research on individual board members has tended to focus on attitudes and personal characteristics with research on behaviors limited to the fulfillment of prescriptive tasks. This article develops a nine-behavior model of board member behavior using three board member roles (individual, board, and organizational) and three types of behavior (proficient, adaptive, and proactive). The model was tested using survey data acquired from Canadian provincial sport governing bodies. The data did not support adaptive behaviors, but a revised model was supported by the data. The results suggested board members perceive expectations to fulfill individual tasks, work together, and implement positive change. This research provides an empirically tested framework for continuing the advancement in governance research beyond a structural and compositional approach to an approach that captures the social and behavioral nature of boards.