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The literature considers three main models of nonprofit sector structure and development: liberal, welfare partnership, and social democratic. This study analyzes the cases of Italian and Canadian nonprofit organizations (NPOs) that operate in two third-sector contexts, widely known as “hybrids.” In particular, we aim to verify whether some features of governance, leadership, and volunteer participation have impacts on the financial performances of selected Italian and Canadian NPOs.

Differences between the two studied nonprofit contexts influenced the sampling, the data collection, and the methods of analysis. Data on Italian and Canadian NPOs are analyzed both together and separately, using multiple regression models. Revenues, fund-raising and other grants from the general public, and program expenses are used as measurements of financial performance.

Our analysis demonstrates that some board characteristics, as well as volunteer participation and representation on the board, have impacts on the nonprofit financial performance. The characteristics of the CEO studied in this work are not significantly associated with the level of financial performance.

This study has several important implications for research on board characteristics, CEO characteristics and volunteer management and governance, as well as implications for practitioners. The limitations of this study are related mostly to the different methods used for sampling NPOs and collecting data in the two different country contexts due to the different level of availability of data.

The past literature has not adequately examined the relationships among the board and CEO characteristics, the role of volunteers in governance and financial performance.

Recent literature on nonprofit boards of directors has extensively investigated the composition, role, responsibilities, and characteristics of boards. Given the growing number of studies on nonprofit boards, which added new impulse to the debate on the role and characteristics of these players, it is time to analyze the state of the art and systematize the current knowledge. On the other hand, despite the presence of some literature reviews, a research comparing the debate among the nonprofit, private, and public sectors is still lacking. Using Gabrielsson and Huse’s (2004) framework, we wanted to identify factors that can influence research on nonprofit boards and compare our results with existing studies on private and public sector.

We conduct a systematic literature review, selecting empirical articles published in international scientific journals from 1992 to 2012.

We found similarities and differences in relation to research on boards among sectors. As a common result, we found that evolutionary studies still remains a neglected area in all of three realms. Finally, whereas input–output studies prevail in the private sector and contingency studies prevail in the public sector, behavioral studies prevail in the nonprofit sector, demonstrating, also, that the sector itself can make a difference in the board’s research.

This literature review provides some suggestion for further research on boards for all of three sectors. For example, we suggest complementing research on boards on all three sectors, especially in relation to evolutionary studies.

This paper fills the need to clarify the status of research on nonprofit boards, in order to address scholars in the understanding of the phenomenon.

Purpose – Grant-giving foundation leaders are increasingly concerned with understanding the primary role their institutions are pressured to play in financing the growing nonprofit sectors. The main objective of the chapter is to determine whether effective governance plays a major role in driving foundations’ innovation and value-creation processes.Methodology – Building on the idea that foundations should act as financial partners, managerial experts, and innovator facilitators who deal with the projects proposed by nonprofit organizations, this chapter uses a survey and the annual reports of Italian grant-giving foundations to isolate their records in term of governance, innovation attitude, and performance.Findings – The results of this chapter contribute to improving understanding of the drivers that help foundations to improve the sophistication level of the grant-giving process. In particular, the analysis of governance provides relevant insights about the path foundations follow to incorporate selected tailored methods and practices from the “for profit” competitive arena to improve foundations’ output and nonprofit grantees’ outcomes.Social implication – Many academics, political leaders, and practitioners expect foundations to play the unique dual role of merchant bank and venture capitalist to foster the positive impact of nonprofit organizations on societies and people. The findings of this chapter facilitate this process.Originality/value of the chapter – The main contribution of this study lies in proposing and testing a theoretical framework that foundations can implement to disseminate liquidity and managerial expertise efficiently among selected grantees and to improve grantees’ social outcome.

Purpose – During the last decade, several nonprofit governance codes have emerged in Germany and Switzerland. In contrast to the corporate sector, where one code exists in each country, the nonprofit sector has not unified its initiatives on governance guidelines. This research study searches for reasons of this heterogeneity by analyzing the content of the governance codes.Design/methodology/approach – Based on a comparative content analysis of 15 governance codes from Germany and Switzerland, this survey gives some insight about the different range of issues and levels of detail.Findings – The findings report a great variety among the nonprofit governance codes. Three different clusters are defined in order to classify the governance codes regarding their information detailedness. Some codes present the basic principles, others give detailed information on focused subjects, and some others function as soft law with a large scope. Additionally, the kind of the producers does have an influence on the content of nonprofit governance codes.Research limitations/implications – The survey is limited because of its geographically focus. However, several implications for further research can be drawn, that are of international relevance. Better knowledge is necessary about the implementation of the governance codes. Additionally, further influence factors on the content of governance besides the kind of the producers have to be analyzed. Finally, it would be interesting to test the acceptance of the codes and the participation process of development among a larger group of organizations that complies with a governance code.Originality/value – For the first time, a complete list of all nonprofit governance codes in the two countries was conducted as a basis for this study. Former studies used a smaller sample of governance codes without clarifying the reasons for the selection.

Literature on nontraditional firms has focused on behavioral differences with for-profit firms. Less attention has been given to the variations in behavior among nontraditional firms. This chapter examines differences across three types of Uruguayan nonprofit health care organizations.

This chapter draws on a unique dataset of Uruguayan health care organizations during the period 1982–1990, as well as interviews with doctors working in the three types of nonprofits during spring 2010. We use a simple OLS regression to identify differences in average behavior, and differences in reaction to a regulatory change.

The chapter shows that structure of stake holding and governance significantly affect behavior, even where many behaviors are highly regulated.

These findings highlight the importance of specifying governance structure when predicting behavior of nontraditional firms. Empirical tests of behavioral differences between traditional and nontraditional firms will be more meaningful if the governance structure of nontraditional firms is common and specified. A limitation of our study is our inability to control for the timing of degeneration of producer cooperatives. This would be one element of governance structure to consider in future data collection.

These findings highlight the need to avoid drawing broad policy conclusions from the behavior of a specific subset of nontraditional firms.

This chapter highlights the importance of carefully specifying stakeholder and governance structure when predicting behavior of nontraditional firms. It is of interest to anyone using a sample of nontraditional firms to test general hypotheses about their behavior.

This paper examines the role that effective governance plays in driving the strategies of grant-giving foundations as it relates to supporting various types of charitable and philanthropy activities of public interest. Today, foundations are more than ever active as pivotal element of the so called ‘private welfare state’ all around Europe and the United States. While other forms of organizations involved in philanthropy and public welfare face competition (i.e. corporations), budget constrain (i.e. governments) or fundraising imperatives (i.e. NGOs), private foundations do not feel such a pressure and can, therefore, tackle social issues that other organizations may not. Despite this privileged position, the role of governance in such non-profit organizations is far from certain. Prior literature review shows the lack of empirical analysis related to the role of governance in foundations as they attempt to shape various projects of strong public interest.

Given foundations’ unique societal role and obligations and the fiscal advantages enjoyed by them, the objective of this study is to explore the factors that drive their decision-making and resource allocation process and to examine the efficacy of their financial and non-financial resource allocation decisions. Using the data collected from 112 large Italian foundations, this paper studies the relationship between the governance mechanism and philanthropic strategies of private foundations.

The significance of the study is based on the fact that in the non-profit sector, more than in the for-profit one, board members are called to play a strong advisory role at the top of their traditional monitoring role. In other words, active boards are expected to screen relevant public needs and to properly invest foundations’ resources in meritorious projects; while inert boards risks to pursuit private goals, camouflaged as public interest, and to dissipate resources by unconditionally financing unrelated grant requests.

This paper aims to empirically examine if and how different governance attributes associate with different philanthropic strategies. The choice of Italian foundations represents an ideal research environment considering the strong reduction of governmental social spending due to the financial crisis and the simultaneous increase in the social relevance of private foundations to support social causes of significance.

Change in ownership among U.S. community hospitals has been frequent and, not surprisingly, remains an important issue for both researchers and public policy makers. In the past, investor-owned hospitals were long suspected of pursuing financial over other goals, culminating in several reviews that found few differences between for-profit and nonprofit forms (Gray, 1986; Sloan, 2000; Sloan, Picone, Taylor, & Chou, 2001). Nevertheless, continuing to the present day, several states prohibit investor-ownership of community hospitals. Conversions to investor-ownership are only one of six types of ownership change, however, with relatively less attention paid to the other types (e.g., for-profit to nonprofit, public to nonprofit). This study has two parts. We first review the literature on the various types of ownership conversion among community hospitals. This review includes the rate at which conversions occur over time, the relative frequency in conversions between specific ownership categories and the observed effects of conversion on hospital operations (e.g., strategic direction and decision-making processes) and performance (e.g., access, quality, and cost). Overall, we find that the impact of ownership conversion on the different measures is mixed, with slightly greater evidence for positive effects on hospital efficiency. As one explanation for these findings, we suggest that the impact of ownership conversion on hospital performance may be mediated by changes in the hospital's strategic content and process. Such a hypothesis has not been proposed or examined in the literature. To address this gap, we next study the role of strategic reorientation following hospital conversion in a field study. We conceptualize ownership conversion within a strategic adaptation framework, and then analyze the changes in strategy content and process across sixteen hospitals that have undergone ownership conversions from nonprofit to for-profit, public to for-profit, public to nonprofit, and for-profit to nonprofit. The field study findings delineate the strategic paths and processes implemented by new owners post-conversion. We find remarkable similarity in the content of strategies undertaken but differences in the process of strategic decision making associated with different types of ownership changes. We also find three main performance effects: hospitals change ownership for financial reasons, experience increases in revenues and capital investment post-conversion, and pursue labor force reductions post-conversion. Membership in a multi-hospital system, however, may be a major determinant of both strategy content and decision-making process that is confounded with ownership change. That is, ownership conversion may mask the impact of system membership on a hospital's strategic actions. These findings may explain the pattern of performance effects observed in the literature on ownership conversions.

Today's competitive health care markets demand innovation and risk taking on the part of organizations. However, increased government regulation and stiffer penalties enacted in the wake of recent high-profile corporate scandals and the resulting Sarbanes–Oxley legislation, may render boards less willing to undertake entrepreneurial ventures. This article extends the typology of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) developed by Covin and Miles (1999) by extending the CE types to address governance activities in the health care sector. Four case studies are presented that illustrate each of the typology's forms. In addition, the implications of the typology for health care executives and trustees are discussed and areas for future research are recommended.