A descriptive study of management in selected nonprofit organizations.

Abstract

Finally, the findings indicate support for a number of notions cited in the literature; specifically cited, issues of professionalism, finance, governance, measurement of organizational performance, and personnel. It was suggested that institutions of higher education give consideration to developing a curriculum for potential administrators of nonprofit organizations. It is believed that this type of effort would be beneficial by providing a forum for exchange, providing opportunities for research and development in the field, and fostering a future of collegial relationships thereby providing a foundation upon which associates in the Third Sector could build.

The organizational administrator's educational profile is dominated by the Master's degree. The curriculum most frequently cited as having been studied was business administration. The administrators reported attending more than ten training courses in the last three years, and were most often attending service-specific training.

This study seeks to answer a fundamental question, "What is management like in nonprofit organizations?" In an attempt to answer this question the author developed five research questions which focus on organizational character, management functions, management concerns, and administrative profiles. A questionnaire was administered to twelve organizational administrators.

Personnel issues ranked as most important to the administrators. They also indicated the strongest concern for these issues. The importance of issues related to professionalism ranked as second, followed by issues related to finances. Environmental and finance issues both ranked as third in eliciting concern.

Administrators perceived the informational roles as less important than interpersonal and decisional roles. They perceived their performance to be more competent in the interpersonal and decisional roles. However they acknowledged the frequency of occurrence of the informational role as the greatest.

Reporting of the findings includes a description of the Oklahoma County environment, a clinical summary of each of the twelve sample organizations, and a general statistical summary of the entire sample.