The Religious Background And Organizational Effectiveness Of Nonprofit Organizations

This study mainly focuses on the role of religion in social service organization development. Based on field work observation, the author found that there are two kinds of faith-based social service organizations:in one kind of organization, religious factors could be realized easily through name and logo, but the productions are secular; and in the other one, religious character is hard to find out, but their social service and public good supply contain religion factors significantly. How should we understand it? The author tries to build an analytic framework, through a comparative analysis of organizational effectiveness to explain the logic of religious background.Comparative case study method is the main research method, in order to explore religious factors how to effective organizational effectiveness. Based on theoretical question, the organizations are divided into to groups. First of all, in each group, faith-based organization is compared with secular organizations which are similar on size, organization structure, and relationship with government in order to explore whether religion background will make difference on organizational effectiveness. The results are different in two groups. So, and then, comparing between two groups, and the author tries to explain which factors of religious background effective the organizational effectiveness.The results show that when the "religious background" of organization means outlook, it is useless for organizational effectiveness. And when the "religious background" of organization means self-identity, recourse, products character and working methods, it is valuable for organizational effectiveness. When the "religious background" of organization means organizational culture and staff personal belief, the effectiveness is not stainable:if they work on organization goals and daily works, it is valuable for organizational effectiveness.In one word, through comparative analysis of organizational effectiveness of faith-based social service organizations, the author found that, religion plays two kinds of role, the one is "public face" and the other one is "spirit support". The reasons are that the fragmentation of state on religion policies and attitude makes institutional basement, at the same time, the fragmentation between different government sectors supplies strategies for faith-based social service organization. Diffusion characters of Chinese religion and religioness become spirit basement of organization development.