Doctor of Management, Case Western Reserve University, 2011, 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-D (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kalle Lyytinen, Ph.D. (Advisor); Paul Salipante, Ph.D. (Advisor) Subjects: Ethics; Organizational Behavior