This reference is a study centered on three aspects within a nonprofit organization: leadership, empowerment, and commitment. It goes into detail about each of these aspects, if they correlate, and whether they help or hinder a nonprofit organization. It does discuss leadership in a nonprofit in general, but introduces the idea of servant leadership and states that it is the way a leader desires to serve a follower, hence the use of the word servant.
It then discusses aspects of organizational commitment, structural and psychological empowerment, pulling information from their study as well as referencing different studies done prior to theirs. In general, each of these aspects helps an organization and are related in some way, for example in multiple different studies there is a positive relationship between servant leadership and organizational commitment.
It also discusses the relationship between structural and psychological empowerment, saying there is a correlation between the two, but noting that psychological empowerment is an effect of structural empowerment. It then discusses the conceptual model of this study which is the relationship between each of the aspects already mentioned. They highlight that empowerment feelings increase not only motivation but also the meaning of work and a personal sense of power.
The methodology is then discussed; this study was conducted with a survey of employees from a nonprofit organization with more than 20 branches located in a region of the United States. Their study also included methods from other similar studies to measure certain aspects such as structural empowerment. 128 employees of the nonprofit participated, some were full-time, others were part-time and the overall response rate for the survey was 14.6%.
The findings show that servant leadership did have a moderate relationship with structural empowerment and that structural empowerment had a stronger relationship with organizational commitment for this specific organization. Also, that leadership can contribute to empowering organizational structures and that this kind of structure is also associated with a higher organizational commitment, even if an employee does not view their job as meaningful.
Overall, this study gives insight into the relationship between both leadership and organizational commitment in a nonprofit organization and notes that the understanding that one can make an impact is a valuable outcome to increased organizational commitment and structural empowerment.
To read more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nml.21311
Allen, S., Winston, B. E., Tatone, G. R., & Crowson, H. M. (2018). Exploring a model of servant leadership, empowerment, and commitment in nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 29(1), 123-140. doi:10.1002/nml.21311
