Environmental and organizational features and their impact on structural and functional characteristics of boards in nonprofit organizations

Boards of directors govern not-for-profit organizations and they are responsible for the overall performance and the ultimate achievements of the organization. In this study two questions are examined: First, the impact of the organization's external task environment on the characteristics of board's structure and functioning in nonprofit organizations; and second, the relationships between organizational features and board's structure and functioning. The study included a stratified sample of 161 non-profit organizations in Israel. Data collection included face-to-face interviews with 121 executive directors and 40 board chairpersons. The results show that only collaboration with other organizations in the task environment was significantly positively correlated with several functional characteristics of the boards. Organizational characteristics such as age, membership size, and number of paid workers were significantly positively correlated with a number of board structural and functional characteristics of boards. In addition, significant intercorrelations between structural and functional characteristics of boards were found. The results are discussed and further avenues of research are proposed.