Understanding Changes in Board and Director Roles in a Nonprofit Organization: The Need for Paradigm Synthesis and Elaboration

Abstract

This article presents a case study examining nonprofit board and director roles in the first 5 years of an organization’s life, using 3 organizational change approaches: contingency, life-cycle, and cognitive-interpretive. Data include monthly board meeting minutes and director’s reports for the first 5 years of a nonprofit human service agency’s existence. The article concludes that although all 3 theoretical approaches are productive explanatory frameworks for organizational change, each one, on its own, is incomplete. The findings point to the need for further theoretical synthesis and paradigm elaboration to inform our understanding of nonprofit director and board relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• nonprofit board
• organizational change
• nonprofits
• contingency theory
• organizational life-cycle
• cognitiveinterpretive