What are the implications of assuming that employees have the knowledge and ability to direct their own work and make valuable contributions to achieving organizational success? This article explores some answers to this question by, among others: reviewing ideas of early management thinkers; establishing the pedigree of current management concepts of empowerment and participation; and by extracting lessons from successful management implementation of the latter two concepts in two types of organizations rarely discussed in the management literature: non‐profits and partnerships. Among the lessons for managers is the need to recognize the important roles that strong missions, genuine trust, and widely dispersed information play in attaining organizational success via empowerment and participation. Also examined are some unique and paradoxical challenges presented to leaders if they truly obtain the participation acknowledged as crucial for organizational survival in a postmodern age.

The media is filled with tales of careers and lives derailed by extramarital affairs often depicting such affairs in organizational/occupational terms: affairs begin in and/or upend organizational life and certain occupations are rife with cheaters. Yet, organizational science has been relatively silent on the topic. A review of literature from psychology, sociology, and economics provides an opening for the organizational researcher through the concepts of structural and cultural opportunity. Employing insights from organizational research on occupations and ethics, it is the intention of this article to develop models of structural and cultural (ethical) climate antecedents of extramarital affair opportunity.

This Research Note introduces nonprofit scholars to the contemporary analytical tool of conditional inference trees as a means to shed more light on the institutional forces behind the changing composition of nonprofit boards of trustees. Revisiting the data of the Six-Cities Cultures of Trusteeship Project, this note illustrates the illuminating power of conditional inference trees for analyzing data (particularly categorical data), not well served by significance testing. Applying these popular models adds depth, nuance, and increased clarity to some of the original findings from the Six-Cities research project. This empirical case serves as a how-to for future researchers hoping to more flexibly model the relative impact of institutional (and other) variables on nonprofit organization structures, as well as expand their methodological toolkit when dealing with all sorts of regression problems.

Scholars have suggested myriad characterizations of the relationship between organizations of the nonprofit sector and government. We expand upon Young’s “slight twist” of the economic supplementary view of government/nonprofit partnership to develop a model to explain the variation in levels of funding by local educational foundations (LEFs) in New Jersey public school districts. Seeking to better understand this private financing of public education, we empirically test for correlates of these funding variations using Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990 data. Although we could not empirically verify an inverse relationship between state aid to education and level of LEF granting, we did find some evidence of a direct relationship between such private financing and median household income. Our analysis supports a more historically nuanced explanation of the role of LEFs in New Jersey public education.

Charity watchdogs and the media level serious allegations of mismanagement of funds at charities serving former and current members of the U.S. armed services, affecting service recipients, families, donors, grantors, foundations, and taxpayers. To examine these allegations, we use two approaches from the literature to assess nonprofit financial effectiveness: the organization’s ability to gain resources and to sustain activities. We mirror the approach of charity raters, whose measures are widely available to the public. Using GuideStar/Internal Revenue Service data, we compare fund-raising expenditures, assets, and financial sustainability of large national military and veterans nonprofits to a random sample of national nonprofits. We apply propensity score matching and compare organizations similar in size, age, and other factors. We find little difference between military and veterans charities and other nonprofits and provide an improved method for evaluating the financial health of nonprofits across academic discipline, nonprofit field of service, and within or among countries.