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This chapter reviews ethical challenges confronting nonprofit administration in relation to organizational managerial practices and leadership behaviors. Through a theoretical model of nonprofit-specific toxic leadership, it reviews the dynamics of destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments in cases of unethical and corrupt nonprofit organizational behaviors. It provides a case for prioritizing oversight responsibilities of the board of directors, board supervision, promoting ethical culture in organizational leadership, and implementing policies for addressing destructive and corrupt nonprofit leaders. It reflects on how nonprofit toxic leadership primarily erodes public trust in the nonprofit sector and concludes with practical recommendations for recentering positive behaviors congruent with the nonprofit's social and public good mission.

The purpose of this paper is to examine philanthropic partnerships between donor organizations and nonprofits and how ethics of care may play an important role in the quality of relationship between the partners.

In total, 29 in-depth interviews were conducted with communications professionals at nonprofit organizations to understand how their partnerships with national sport organizations benefited their organizations and how characteristics of the sport organizations’ communication and behavior have consequence for their partners.

The four dimensions of ethics of care (building trust, showing mutual concern, promoting human flourishing and responsiveness to needs) clearly emerged as the most beneficial ways sport organizations engage with their nonprofit partners.

This study introduces the concept of ethic of care into the CSR literature and suggests that ethics of care may play an important role in relationship management with key publics.

Practically, this study offers insights for corporate partners about the way their communication and behavior influence nonprofits, and it suggests ways that corporations can improve their work with partners to create a more productive relationship.

This is one of the first studies to use ethics of care to examine the relationship of CSR partnerships and the first to conduct a study with sport organizations.

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.

This is a study of ethical climates in nonprofit and government sectors in Japan, the aim of which is to determine the extent to which similarities (and differences) exist in ethical climate dimensions, what drives the differences and what are the implications for the sectors in this country.

Using survey data and structural equation modeling techniques, the factors structure equivalence and measurement invariance of ethical climates in the two sectors were tested. The original sample was made by 1,012 participants (500 public officials and 512 nonprofit executive directors). Due to some missing values, a net sample of 441 questionnaires (for nonprofit) and 321 questionnaires (for government) were used for the final analysis.

Results of this study indicate that there was a significant overlap in shared perception of all ethical climates in the two sectors. There should be an effort to continue building on these commonalities so as to provide an effective framework to build trusting relationships between the two sectors.

This study provides important insights that would allow policy makers in government to better understand the implications of using nonprofit partners to deliver services. It would also provide a theoretical and empirical starting point from which government‐nonprofits relationships in Japan can be better understood.

This was the first time that such a type of research was conducted in Japanese nonprofit and government sectors. Furthermore, among all the empirical studies on ethical climate, this is based on one of the largest sample of respondents in both sectors.

The purpose of this paper is to show how, by looking within one group of nonprofits, perceptions of ethical climate may differ in the nonprofit sector, both within and between separate country contexts.

Executive directors in two groups of social services nonprofits in the UK and Japan were surveyed, and several subsequently interviewed, in accordance with the Ethical Climate Scale developed by Agarwal and Molloy.

The paper finds that perceptions of the ethical climate types relating to “independence” and “law and codes” were polarized, with executive directors in the UK being more likely to base moral decisions on the evaluation of rights, values or principles than on public opinion. In Japan, however, such decisions were predominantly focused on how they would impact on others, both within and outside the organization, in the context of personal responsibility to society and the maintenance of social order.

Social service nonprofits nowadays occupy a major role in the delivery of services which the state used to provide alone. It has therefore become essential for governments to be able to assess the internal culture of nonprofits in order to determine their trustworthiness and reliability, and the best yardstick for this is ethical climate. This research will help state and local government policy makers toward a better understanding of their contractors.

The originality of this study lies primarily in the fact that it was the first time that this type of research had compared similar nonprofit organizations in different countries.

Purpose – this chapter contrasts the ethical climates in government and nonprofit organizations (npos) in japan, a setting where the relationship between these two sectors has been recognized as close and long-lasting (estevez-abe, 2003; hirata, 2002; ritu, 2008). Yet, there has been little comparison of the value difference (or congruence) or discussion of how this may influence their interaction over time. This chapter explains why nonprofit partners may be more attractive partners for governmental contracts, notwithstanding the dangers of “mission drift” (young & denize, 2008) and/or high monitoring costs (malloy & agarwal, 2008).

Design/methodology/approach – Using survey data from matched samples of nonprofits (441, 86% response rate) and governmental organizations (321, 64%), the factor structure equivalence and measurement invariance of ethical climates in these two sectors were rigorously tested.

Findings – The findings extend prior typologies of ethical climate from for-profit and nonprofit organizations to governmental organizations. The chapter revisits the notion of opportunism, which continues to be pervasive and problematic in third-sector studies (Hawkins, Gravier, & Powley, 2011) to suggest that significant overlap in ethical climates between nonprofit and governmental organizations rules out value differences as a possible source of opportunism.

Originality/value – This study contributes a deeper awareness of the similarities and differences in ethical perceptions between nonprofit and governmental organizations that can inform policy makers in government to better understand the implications of using nonprofit partners to deliver services.

This case deals with a purported fraud perpetrated on a nonprofit organization named Springfield Downtown, Inc. by its Executive Director, Donna Anderson. Under Anderson’s leadership from 2003 to 2010, the downtown area of Springfield, California, had been completely revitalized. Then in 2010, the Board of Directors began to uncover a practice followed by Anderson of converting checks addressed to Springfield Downtown, Inc. for her own private use. After an initial Police Department investigation of the practice, the Board of Directors launched its own internal analysis and discovered at least $415,000 in “questioned check activity.”

The focus of the case is on the ethics of decisions made by Anderson and steps taken by the leadership of Springfield Downtown to assess the implications of the financial fraud using the fraud triangle. Questions are posed to evaluate the actions of Anderson from an ethical perspective and the implications of weaknesses in internal controls in nonprofit organizations for financial fraud.

This article asks how gender, ethnicity and other identities intersect and shape the employment experiences of social workers. During recent decades, governments have contracted social care to for-profit and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) globally as a part of the adaption of the neoliberal approach. Most employees in these organizations are women. However, there is a lack of knowledge about women working in social service NPOs and their unique working environments.

This article explores the experiences of women employed as social workers in social care NPOs in Israel regarding intersectionality. 27 in-depth interviews were conducted with women social workers working in social service NPOs. Participants reflected diversity in ethnicity, religion and full-time and part-time jobs. Thematic analysis was used.

The findings shed light on: (1) the contradiction social workers experienced between the stated values of the social care NPO and those values’ conduct, (2) intersectional discrimination among social workers from vulnerable populations and (3) the lack of gender-aware policies.

The need to raise awareness of the social care sector and governments to those contradictions and to promote diversity through gender-aware policies and practices.

The article suggests a conceptualization describing gender employment contradictions in social care NPOs, discusses how the angle of intersectionality expands the understanding of the complexities and pressures exerted on social workers from minority groups and emphasizes the need for social care NPOs to acknowledge and deal with these contradictions.