- Newton, Brian L. (x)
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Show moreThe role that leaders perform in governing nonprofit organizations has confounded practitioners and scholars since the time of the early settlers, when the functions of governance were first separated. Is governance the role of the board, management, or both? Today, little has changed. Public and private nonprofit organizations, almost all of which are governed by boards of lay citizens and by professional executives, continue to define the gap between what the board's role is and what the chief executive officer's (CEO) role is. Organizations such as BoardSource (formerly the National Center for Nonprofit Boards), The Aspen Institute, the Independent Sector, and the Foundation Center fund, publish and disseminate research and reports in an attempt to educate, explain, and understand the complexity of nonprofit governance. This present study is based on empirical data of quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, and policy statements from 18 board-chairmen and CEOs with nonprofit electric co-operatives.1 The study describes the perceptions of their roles in governance. Our findings suggest that boards and CEOs recognize their overlapping role in governance. Hence, they put in place systems, processes, and boundaries to facilitate schemes of joint engagement. Furthermore, our results describe practices of engagement as a means of managing complexity and tension between boards and CEOs. The operatives can facilitate joint engagement between boards and CEOs. The results highlight implications of good governance and dimension of joint engagement for practitioners-boards and CEOs, as well as for scholars.
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Show moreAcademicians and practitioners continually reexamine the performance and interaction between nonprofit cooperative boards and managements as they relate to organizational effectiveness. Despite the volumes of academic research and the scores of practitioner-based "how-to" journals, neither present theory nor practice seems to have it rights. Perhaps the paradox is due to the difficulties of governance and the role that boards perform- or fail to perform- or maybe it fall squarely on the shoulders of management and the complexity of leadership. Regardless of the reasons, a performance gap exists (Nicholson & Kiel, 2004). If left unheeded, this gap will cause ineffectiveness and produce such things as misaligned missions, unattained goals, inefficient operations, unending conflict, unresponsive leadership, and most importantly, lack of stakeholder support. This paper proposes to bridge the performance gap through collaborative practices: practices that inspire dialogue between boards and chief executive officer (CEOs) in order to do what is in the best interest of the members [stakeholders] (Balser & McClusky, 2005), practices of 'lay' board members as they control and support management (Conforth, 2004), and most importantly, practices that are consistent with the cooperative's values and mission, rather than adopt 'best practices' of others (Herman & Renz, 2004). Because as past research has shown, leaders that intentionally strive to improve their performance also bolster the organization in its effectiveness (Brudney & Murray, 1998; Gill, Flynn, & Reissing, 2005; Herman & Renz, 1999; Holland & Jackson, 1998; Kiel & Nicholson, 2005).
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