'Dirty Little Secrets' Exploring Successful Governance Approaches to Hybrid Workforce Conflicts in Third-Sector Settings

• In Event: New Directions in Nonprofit Governance and Management

Abstract

Western welfare states are under intensified financial pressure due to continuing austerity politics, thus budgets for social services stagnate and shrink, forcing third sector actors to step in to supply continuous service provision (Musick & Wilson 2008, p. 4). This led to an ongoing trend of professionalization in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) (Maier et al. 2016, Wilson 2012, Dury 2018, Hustnix 2007) and thus to higher hybridity in their workforce (i.e., more volunteers and paid staff working together).

Consequently, governance challenges of these increasingly hybrid workforces intensified (Jacobs et al. 2019, Rerup et al. 2022) and multiple types of conflict emerge (López-Cabrera et al. 2020), hurting the effectiveness of social service provision in NPOs. While scholarship is slowly mapping these structural changes, practitioners already deal with these emerging conflicts in multiple ways not accounted for in the literature. This article abductively explores practitioners’ solutions to the emerging conflicts. This is achieved by focusing on the role of the network ties utilized by volunteers and paid staff (bottom-up) or introduced by management and volunteer coordinators (top-down) to succeed in the co-production of social services despite ongoing conflict emergence (Borgatti et al. 2022, pp. 213). The investigation focuses on nonprofit governance – “the set of conditions that should be fulfilled and practices that should be applied in order to enhance the achievement of a nonprofit organization's mission and vision” (Willems et al. 2017) – of hybrid nonprofit workforces succeeding despite conflict.

The research question is: "How do nonprofit practitioners manage and mitigate conflicts in hybrid workforce settings to succeed in the governance of social service provision?". Accordingly, this article explores in-use structures and strategies employed to avoid, circumvent, and manage conflict and its consequences by utilizing or modifying the volunteers’ or paid staffs’ social network ties. The contribution is split: On the one hand adding to the literature by showing how solutions differ for task-, process-, status- and/or relationship-related conflicts (López-Cabrera et al., 2020, p. 12) in nonprofit social service provision; On the other hand, collecting critical incidents of hybrid workforce conflicts in NPOs and respective best practices to deal with those.

This is achieved by applying an abductive multimethod approach: First, semi-structured qualitative interviews probe for critical incidents of conflict mitigation and circumvention between volunteers and paid staff in multiple service providing NPOs (ongoing). The interviews touch upon the structural compositions and changes in governance to dissect bottom-up from top-down approaches. After preliminary analysis, a second round of interviews adheres to the quality assurance of interpretative social research. Within our theoretical and methodological framework, we narrow down on different options of dealing with such conflicts by in-vivo first-level coding and grouping the results by their contents via second-level coding based on the previously mentioned typology of conflict.

References

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Authors

• Kai U. Klein, Vienna University of Economics and Business

• Jurgen Willems, Vienna University of Economics and Business