Dimensions of Employee Satisfaction Explaining Reputation Building Behavior of Nonprofit Organizations

• In Event: Fortifying Legitimacy: Internal and External Practices

Abstract

Very different opinions exist within and across nonprofit organizations on what good nonprofit performance is, as goals (1) might be very different, (2) might have multiple unrelated dimensions, and (3) might serve very distinct, even contrasting needs of various stakeholders (Helmig, Ingerfurth, & Pinz, 2014). For example, in nonprofit hospitals different stakeholder groups, such as medical staff, administrative staff, patients, and referring specialist might each have very different ideas of what good hospital quality is.
In such subjective and heterogeneous environments, effectiveness – or at least the perceptions on it – is strongly determined by the overall social construction about overall organizational effectiveness across stakeholder groups (Herman and Renz, 1999; 2008). This shared cognition can be defined as the effectiveness reputation of an organization, and is related to the satisfaction about the organization among stakeholders (Willems, Jegers & Faulk, 2016). Hence, an important stakeholder group in the social constructionist process on hospital effectiveness is the group of employees, as they are closely involved, and are, due to their training, well informed to assess organizational quality.
Therefore, our research question focusses on how different dimensions of employee satisfaction explain their contribution to the reputation building process of the organization in which they work. Answering this research question has high practical relevance, as it can provide practitioners with insight on which employee management actions, strongest contribute to their reputation.
For a sample of 1,084 respondents from two hospitals we first explore the dimensions of employee satisfaction, and subsequently test the relatedness of these dimensions with employee referral behavior. An exploratory factor analysis suggests 11 factors, while the complementary SEM analysis shows that in several satisfaction dimensions explain reputation building behavior. We additionally test whether this finding is different for various employee groups (doctors, nurses, administrative personnel, etc.) and find substantial differences between employee groups. We frame our findings in the literature on nonprofit and hospital employee satisfaction, and make the link with the more recent contributions on reputation building.

References:
Helmig, B., Ingerfurth, S., & Pinz, A. (2014) Success and failure of nonprofit organizations: Theoretical foundations, empirical evidence, and future research, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 25(6), 1509-1538.
Herman, R. D., & Renz, D. O. (1999) Theses on nonprofit organizational effectiveness, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 28(2), 107-126.
Herman, R. D., & Renz, D. O. (2008) Advancing nonprofit organizational effectiveness research and theory: Nine theses, Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 18(4), 399-415.
Willems, J., Jegers, M., Faulk, L. 2016. Organizational effectiveness reputation in the nonprofit sector. Public Performance and Management Review. 39(2): 476–497.

Authors

• Stefan Ingerfurth, SRH Mobile University

• Jurgen Willems, University of Hamburg