Sustaining International NGO Organizational Effectiveness

• In Event: Sustaining Leadership Systems From the Local to the International Stage

Short Description

The literature describes approaches leaders can use to assess their organization’s effectiveness. The presentation will examine these methods, drawing on personal experience working with an international NGO, and will suggest how leaders can appropriately assess their organization’s effectiveness in order to improve and sustain it in today’s turbulent and chaotic times.

Detailed Abstract

I will first explore recent academic and practitioner literature on organizational effectiveness to identify and evaluate alternative approaches leaders can use to assess their organization’s effectiveness. I will examine the applicability of these methods drawing on personal experience working with an international nongovernment organization (INGO) in India, Bangladesh, and Haiti. I will then suggest how leaders can appropriately assess their organization’s effectiveness in order to improve and sustain it in today’s turbulent and chaotic times.

Organizations of all types face an increasingly complex and unpredictable economic and political environment. For INGOs these trends are compounded by their dispersed activities and the multicultural nature of their operations which expose them to a wide variety of demands (Lewis, 2014). INGOs often work on issues with complex chains of causality making it difficult to clearly identify the outcomes or impact of a specific organization’s activities and thereby its effectiveness. For many of these issues, the best means to address them are not known or the links between activities and outcomes are not well understood (Dart, 2010). These “wicked” problems are dynamic, nonlinear, counter-intuitive and require interventions that are unique in each setting (Kania, Kramer, & Russell, 2014).

Conceptions of INGOs’ effectiveness are influenced by the dominant economic development paradigm, each of which has different views on the proper role of the nation state, international actors, and civil society (Chabbott, 1999). In the 1980s INGOs were seen as efficient and effective in promoting economic development so their role increased in social service delivery, counterbalancing government power, and holding governments accountable (Chabbott, 1999; Lewis & Kanji, 2009). More recently there has been a significant shrinking of the space open for civil society groups including INGOs (van der Borgh & Terwindt, 2012). Increasingly INGOs are subjected to pressures from host governments who want access to the funding channeled through NGOs (Agg, 2006) or to restrict NGOs’ challenges to the political and economic status quo (Jordan, 2007).

The academic literature of the past fifty years developed three major approaches to assessing organizational effectiveness: goal attainment, system resources, and reputation. The goal attainment model holds that an organization is effective if it accomplishes its stated goals (Cameron, 2005; Forbes, 1998). Since organizational goals are not necessarily unitary, consistent, or shared broadly by organizational members there are difficulties in applying this approach to specific organizations (Baruch & Ramalho, 2006), but the importance of goals fits well with the understanding that organizations are typically created to accomplish particular goals (Dart, 2010).

The system resource approach emphasizes organizations’ resource procurement activities and defines effectiveness as survival, assuming that if an organization continues to acquire the resources it needs for existence, it is effective (Cameron, 2005; Yuchtman & Seashore, 1967). Primary importance is assigned to those groups who supply scarce resources (Connolly, Conlon, & Deutsch, 1980), even when their criteria are at odds with the organization’s mission.

The reputational school argues that organizational effectiveness is determined by the perceptions of organizational stakeholders (Connolly et al., 1980; Lecy, Schmitz & Swedlund, 2012). Since various stakeholder groups within an organization use different criteria to evaluate organizational effectiveness, arriving at an overall consensus is difficult (Herman & Renz, 1997).

Multi-dimensional models attempt to bring together the individual elements of goal accomplishment, resource acquisition, and the degree to which internal systems function smoothly. These models incorporate aspects of the three major approaches described above (Cameron & Whetten, 1983) and also attempt to provide a means for comparing organizations’ effectiveness to themselves over time and to other organizations.

Organizational effectiveness is an important concern for INGO practitioners since the paramount concern for INGOs is to maximize their impact (Clark, 1992). Edwards and Hulme (1992) state that “all serious NGOs want to increase their impact and effectiveness, ensure that they spend their limited resources in the best way possible, and thereby maximize their own particular contribution to the development of people around the world” (p. 14).

A recent study found that CEOs of US-based INGOs understand effectiveness primarily in terms of outcome accountability. This includes “themes of goal attainment, promise-keeping, complex intertemporal evaluation frameworks, and multiple levels of analysis” (Mitchell, 2013, p. 335). For these leaders organizational effectiveness involves not only goal attainment, but also its demonstrability. A study of senior-level leadership team members in INGOs concluded that for them, “organizational effectiveness involves a combination of goal attainment, efficient systems, and sustainability in terms of resources” (Zook, 2015, p. 235). The effectiveness of the organization’s program activities dominated these leaders’ understandings of organizational effectiveness. Important aspects included “meeting the negotiated end results . . . the measurable output against the goals that we set for ourselves . . . and doing what you say and saying what you do, but being able to substantiate it” (Zook, 2015, p. 232).

Organizational effectiveness is best viewed as a process, not an end state (Steers, 1976), which is dependent on “environmental characteristics, employee characteristics, organizational characteristics, and managerial policies and practices” and the ways in which these characteristics work together (Lewin & Minton, 1986, p. 518). Organizations therefore need assessment tools and measures that indicate the current status of these various elements and that highlight areas where improvement is required. These measures need to be combined in a framework that leadership can use to assess and report on the elements that comprise organizational effectiveness: goal attainment, resource acquisition, system operations, and sustainability. It is important to include outcome measures, financial measures, mission faithfulness measures, system functioning measures, and organizational capacity measures in order to get a full picture of the organization’s effectiveness. These assessment systems need to be both simple and practical while capturing the essence of the changes that result from the organization’s work (Hailey, James, & Wrigley, 2005). In addition to helping leadership guide the organization, frameworks of this type can also play an important role in communication with organizational stakeholders.

Participant

• Gordon A. Zook, Mennonite Central Committee