AROUND THE CENTER
Editors' Prize Awarded to William A. Brown at ARNOVA's Awards Luncheon
The Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations, the editorial and advisory boards of Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and Jossey-Bass are pleased to announce that the Editors' Prize for Best Scholarly Paper for Volume 15 has been awarded to:
William A. Brown
for his article
"Exploring the Association Between Board and Organizational
Performance in Nonprofit Organizations"
Professor Brown's study investigated six dimensions of effective board performance in relation to three theoretical explanations (agency theory, resource dependency theory, and group/decision process theory) of how board governance activities potentially influence organizational performance. Survey research findings revealed that strategic contributions from the board are more robust in organizations with higher financial performance. Organizations judged to be higher performing also reported having high-performing boards across all dimensions. In particular, the interpersonal dimension provided a unique explanation of judgments of organizational performance. This dimension is "an area of less prominence is the practitioner literature than, say, the monitoring function," writes Brown, "but this study suggests that time spent building an effective board as a team is not wasted."
William A. Brown, associate professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, teaches graduate courses on nonprofit organizations and program evaluation. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from Claremont Graduate University and a B.S. in Education from Northeastern University at Boston. Dr. Brown has worked with numerous organizations in the direct provision of services, consulting, and board governance. His research focuses on nonprofit governance and organizational effectiveness.
The Editors' Prize is awarded annually for the best paper published in NML during the preceding subscription year. Winners receive a $1,000 cash prize courtesy of the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations and $1,000 in books from Jossey-Bass.
Winners are selected by the members of the editorial and advisory boards of NML. Criteria are based on the author's contribution to knowledge in the field of nonprofit management, the quality of the writing and analysis, and the usefulness of the information for the practice of nonprofit management and leadership.
