Abstract
Civil society is positioned somewhere in the area between business, government, and private sector. As civil society organizations are not profit-oriented, they are often relying on the engagement of volunteers, i.e., workers who are not paid for their effort. Successful management of human resources in organizations that depends on volunteers’ work can prove even harder than managing employees’ work in business entities. Many factors influence someone’s work effort, productivity, and devotion far beyond technical conditions, so it is impossible to separate someone’s work from the rest of his/her personality traits. In civil society organizations, attracting, motivating, and keeping volunteers willing to conduct needed tasks and actively participate in the organization’s activities might be quite challenging. For this paper, a survey was conducted among 42 organizations of civil society units (CSUs) that use the help of volunteers to fulfill their activities. To analyze relative efficiency of the civil society units, appropriate input and output variables were selected, and analysis was conducted with non-parametric DEA method. It was decided to take 4 inputs and 2 outputs in the analysis. The obtained results show that 69% of 42 CSUs are relatively efficient, 31% relatively inefficient, and 26.19% below the average. The results of the analysis enabled the identification of efficient and inefficient units. The reference set was calculated for each inefficient unit to determine which inputs cause better performance output. The calculated projections can be useful to CSU’s managers and serve as a benchmark for detecting the source of inefficiency within their humanitarian organizations. They can also serve as guidelines for improving inputs and thus achieving higher levels of outputs, i.e., duration of volunteering and the number of volunteers. AcknowledgmentThis paper is financially supported through project ZP UNIRI 10/17 by the University of Rijeka.
Highlights
As civil society organizations are not profit-oriented, they are often relying on the engagement of volunteers, i.e., workers who are not paid for their effort
The success of business activities of civil society organizations is almost entirely dependent of human resources, i.e., the enthusiasm of individuals and the working atmosphere. These two features, as it is well known, are intangible and hard to measure. This problem is even broader because civil society organizations are faced with a constant lack of high-quality human resources or human resources per se
Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used to explore the efficiency of 42 selected civil society units in volunteering
Summary
The decision on the number of selected the efficiency in civil society organization units inputs and outputs is based on the assumption that ( ) 3 According to CCR efficiency definition, DMU is CCR efficient if θ * = 1 and if there is at least one optimal solution v*, u* for which the following applies: v* > 0, u* > 0. The initial results showed a representative difference in the number of units found efficient by According to the nature of the problem, the out- these two models, i.e., 50% and 69%, respectiveput-oriented model was selected in which the pro- ly (Table 1) This significant difference implies the jections are calculated in that the same amount of appearance of the variable return to scale (VRS), inputs maximizes the outputs (number of volun- which further implies that changes in inputs do teers, i.e., time spent volunteering). Not cause a linear increase in the length of volunteering and the number of volunteers in this case
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