Business Commons^™

Unfunded Stakeholder Mandates And Nonprofit Performance Impacts, Courtney Lyn Coe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small nonprofit organizations, with annual budgets of $500,000 or less, are assigned many obligations by external stakeholders while conducting their mission-related work. However, little is known about the impact of these obligations or mandates being received from their external stakeholders, which rarely have funding allocated to minimize any capacity impact they create. The purpose of this study was to learn about whether, and how, the organizational capacity of small nonprofit organizations is impacted by unfunded mandates. Applying the theoretical framework of rational choice theory, the patterns revealed by the data allow the ability to draw conclusions based upon the lived …