The Contingencies of Non-Profit Leadership

Hillel Schmid*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

Non-profit organizations (NPOs) play a major role as providers of social, cultural, religious, and many other services. Some NPOs are also significant loci of social mobilization and political advocacy. To do both at the same time requires careful management of relations to political, in particular government, actors who value and often pay for NPO service delivery, but who are not necessarily enamoured of NPO activism that is critical of existing social policies and service-delivery philosophies. At the level of the political system as a whole, the public leadership exercised by the NPO sector is therefore fundamentally ambivalent: in part derived from formal, delegated or contracted roles in policy implementation through public service delivery; and in part informal, partisan and potentially oppositional, rooted in social or professional ideologies as well as claims to representation of client and stakeholder groups. This chapter argues that the leadership challenges faced by the senior strata of various types of NPOs that can be distinguished differ greatly, and conduce to different philosophies and styles of leadership.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDispersed Democratic Leadership
Subtitle of host publicationOrigins, Dynamics, and Implications
PublisherOxford University Press
ISBN (Electronic)9780191701856
ISBN (Print)9780199562992
DOIs
StatePublished - 3 Oct 2011

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Oxford University Press, 2014.

Keywords

  • Advocacy
  • Autonomy
  • Dispersed leadership
  • Leadership
  • Non-profit organizations
  • Politics
  • Social services

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