Human Resource Management in Nonprofit-Organizations

The characteristics of nonprofit organizations as well as the heterogeneity of the third-sector lead to specific challenges for the human resource management within these organizations.

Within this context, there is a vast variety of different types of possible employment-contracts as well as different types of possibilities for volunteer-work. As those various groups of workers are motivated for their work by different reasons and oppose different types of demands upon the organisation and their management, this leads to specific challenges for the human resource function within this context. Despite those challenges, which appear to be more complex compared to the human resource management within the context of profit-oriented organizations, the importance of the HR function in the nonprofit context however does not appear to be recognised by the vast majority of organizations. There seems to be several plausible reasons for this, as for example many of the organizations in the third sector are small by size and lack sufficient resources to invest in their human resources and its strategic potential. Another possible explanation could lie within a generally lower perceived importance of a management of human resources within a context of volunteer work.

It is therefore the goal of this work, to better understand the differences among those types of work within the nonprofit organizations and by this contribute to a better possibility of managing those accordingly.

In a first step, an effort is made to understand the factors influencing the satisfaction and the commitment of different types of workers within a nonprofit organization. A second part of the work will then focus on the role of compensation within those organisations and produce an overview of the compensation patterns in the Swiss nonprofit sector and derive management-implications based on this overview.