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The Great Recession and Nonprofit Endurance: Framing the Mission-Defensive Paradox

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2011, Doctor of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Weatherhead School of Management.
The “Great Dilemma” of the Great Recession forced nonprofit organizations to manage the dual challenge of carrying out their missions to greater, needier constituencies and survive, with fewer resources. Despite suggestive advice garnered from seminars and practice-based sector think-tanks, there is little in the scholarly literature that would specifically inform and guide nonprofit leaders through cycles of economic adversity. This exploratory, mixed methods inquiry was intended to lay the groundwork for further examination of nonprofit performance and reliability during the Great Recession, and by extension, to subsequent episodes of economic adversity. We were guided by, and contribute to, organizational ecology and survival theory, as well as research pertaining to highly-reliable organizations to study how nonprofits managed the challenge of carrying out the organizational mission during this stressful period. We first focused on the lived experience of executive leaders, and found very clear distinctions between the most stable and most vulnerable organizations in their prevention-oriented, pre-planned stance against risk and crisis events. A second phase of the research used a conceptual model focused on mission-defensive behavior, comprised of mindful, protective, and coping mechanisms, to analyze 351 executive leader survey responses. The results indicate the impact of executive and board leadership on organizational resiliency and resourcefulness under conditions of financial duress. We found the Great Recession provoked “conflicts of commitment” (Golden-Biddle & Rao, 1997) and a willingness to engender deep financial retrenchment and deficit spending, if necessary, to keep serving constituents. However, executive-driven coping strategies and outwardly-focused orientation, augmented by mindful and protective policies, significantly improved financial resiliency and enterprising resourcefulness. We also propose a novel construct – Mission-Defensive Posture – to broaden the theoretical view of crisis management by adding risk and ethical awareness to our research framework. In addition, we substantiate a dynamic list of strategies that may be employed to counter the next recession’s impact, and establish a scale for measuring the Mindfulness construct postulated by Weick & Sutcliffe (2007) with a reflective 18 item instrument.
Kalle Lyytinen, Ph.D. (Advisor)
Paul Salipante, Ph.D. (Advisor)

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Roche, K. (2011). The Great Recession and Nonprofit Endurance: Framing the Mission-Defensive Paradox [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=casedm1568627407775438

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Roche, Kathleen. The Great Recession and Nonprofit Endurance: Framing the Mission-Defensive Paradox. 2011. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=casedm1568627407775438.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Roche, Kathleen. "The Great Recession and Nonprofit Endurance: Framing the Mission-Defensive Paradox." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=casedm1568627407775438

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)