Abstract
Nonprofit organizations are typically seen as institutional settings that contribute to finding grassroots solutions to various social problems. But in their own turn, these entities exhibit by design manyfold frailties given by factors such as - precarious funding sustainability, balancing the multiple and, at times, divergent interests of stakeholders, finding a suitable manner to assess managerial performance. The aim of this paper consist in employing a system dynamics approach to modelling the managerial behaviour of nonprofit entities delivering their output through project networks. The system dynamics concepts of causal loops, stocks and flows dependencies are used to depict the complex relationships between projects, funding sources and social outcomes. This approach leads to identifying the systemic threatening to nonprofit sustainability and the dynamic nature of managerial decisions in the context of the interactions between nonprofit organizations, their beneficiaries and funding agencies.
Highlights
The system dynamics approach has been proven fruitful in getting a better descriptive venue towards the intricacies of complex systems
Would a system dynamics approach be a suitable perspective to enhance the sustainability of the nonprofit organizations? The paper aims at presenting, through employing a systems dynamics perspective, the feed-back loops intrinsic to the process of satisfying social needs through nonprofit multi-project delivery and the relations between the institutional stakeholders, as given by the resource flows and information transfers
This paper aimed at using the insights of system dynamics modelling for analysing the prospects of sustainability for nonprofits operating in multi-project contexts
Summary
The system dynamics approach has been proven fruitful in getting a better descriptive venue towards the intricacies of complex systems. The paper aims at presenting, through employing a systems dynamics perspective, the feed-back loops intrinsic to the process of satisfying social needs through nonprofit multi-project delivery and the relations between the institutional stakeholders, as given by the resource flows and information transfers. In the context of this paper, a nonprofit is defined as being an organization characterized by a restriction of non-distribution when it comes to profits (through dividends or managerial wages) [2]. A multi-project context refers to project based-organizations, portfolios or programs, which cannot be analysed and explained in terms of merely an aggregation of disparate, independent, projects For nonprofits achieving their missions through arrays of projects, the complexity factor is given by the multiple feed-back loops between the actors of social change and the resourcing needs for project implementation. The last three sections present a stock and flow model of nonprofit dynamic action, the strategic domain and options obtained in various situations of the main stocks of the system and, eventually, some concluding remarks
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