Thesis (Ph.D.)--North Carolina State University, 2020
Includes bibliographical references
Nonprofits have become embedded in an increasingly complex and turbulent environment. Intense competition, shrinking government funding and fewer growth opportunities increase difficulties for nonprofits to maintain their financial stability (Lester M. Salamon, 2004). Moreover, increased external shocks such as fluctuating market conditions and frequent disasters make nonprofits facing more risks (Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007). External shocks, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, pandemic disease, economic recessions, and so on, are often unforeseen and unpredictable, and they may infringe upon a nonprofit's capacity to both generate resources and maintain mission-related operations. Achieving and maintaining sustainability is very challenging for nonprofits because they are highly dependent on external resources, such as external funding and volunteers (Hasenfeld, 2009; B. Never, 2014). This dependency makes nonprofits more vulnerable compared to corporations, that generate their own profits, and compared to public organizations, that rely on taxes (Lin & Wang, 2016; Tuckman & Chang, 1991). Therefore, the interest of this dissertation is to explore how nonprofits can be more resilient and more sustainable when operating in this ever-changing environment.Organizational resilience has been widely studied in the for-profit sector. Research has focused on developing business models of organizational resilience, and organizational responses to external threats, intra-organizational strains, and inter-organizational disruptions. However, there is still a dearth of empirical work focused on organizational resilience in the nonprofit sector. To fulfill this literature gap, this dissertation explores the following two research questions: 1) whether and when nonprofits bounce back to their original financial performance after significant natural disasters? and 2) What organizational capacities and abilities influence the rapidity of bouncing back?This dissertation utilizes a mixed method to study nonprofit resilience. The quantitative analysis applies a discrete-time survival analysis model to explore the impact of nonprofits' financial capacities and strategies on organizational resilience. The qualitative analysis is parallel to the quantitative analysis and explores other organizational abilities and capacities that contribute to nonprofit resilience. The quantitative analysis uses Hurricane Katrina as a case and is based on secondary data obtained from the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) Core PC files. The qualitative analysis uses Hurricane Florence as a case, and the data is collected from ten phone interviews.The quantitative analysis of this dissertation found more than half nonprofits took three years to bounce back to their total expanse level and five years to bounce back to their total net assets level. The pre-disaster equity helps nonprofits bouncing back to its pre-disaster total expense level. Nonprofits with less revenue diversification and commercial revenue are more likely to bounce back to their net asset level before the disaster. The qualitative analysis found that the disaster impacts on nonprofit are complex and nonprofits are different in size, age, resources, knowledge as well, thus, there is no single good recovery path for all types of impacts and nonprofits, and a different recovery path is associated with different efforts and efficiency. Slack of resources and insurance can help a nonprofit recover from property damages, Situation awareness, preparation, abilities to generate new resources, and organizational learning can help nonprofits recover from impacts on their services. Taken together, the findings elucidate how nonprofit can be resilient in a natural disaster context. Besides, this dissertation contributes to better understand organizational resilience in the nonprofit sector and bridges organizational resilience research between the business sector and the nonprofit sector
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest, 2021
