Strategic Management Only Goes So Far…

Mark Hager, Arizona State University

A friend re-posted a meme to her Facebook this afternoon.  I guess it resonates with people, since it shows as shared 27,000 times:

This meme is fun because it winks at people who don’t remember to water their plants. “It’s not your fault,” says the wink. “It’s the impossible environment that this poor plant found itself in.”  Thing is, failures to water aside, environmental shifts are sometimes the entire explanation for what happens to a plant.  Even if you are diligent at watering, the plant is in trouble if a tornado takes out your house.

That makes sense, right? But somehow we seem to forget this when we study and try to explain the behavior of organizations. That’s my read, anyway: These days, scholars tend to focus on the strategic decisions of managers rather than the environments they operate in. This is odd given how nonprofits have struggled through the pandemic, many of which did not have what it takes to thrive in that fast-paced environment.

The tone of the literature felt different to me in the 1990s when I did my first deep readings on organizational behavior and change. W. Richard Scott was a prominent voice, due to his popular textbook titled Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems. Scott emphasized the importance of an organization’s environment, or at least the way its structure related to it. The late 1970s had been a heyday for this kind of thinking. I cut my teeth on the institutionalists (who were all about reactions to environmental pressures) and the population ecologists (who almost completely ignored strategy). Fast forward to the 2020s and these perspectives feel like ancient history.

Now, I don’t want to go so far as to say that nobody talks about environments anymore. Surely we do, and you probably don’t have to search too far to find a good recent paper that considers the influence of environments on operations. That said, I feel that the strategic management perspective that is so prominent in business schools has permeated all the places where management is considered, including the study of nonprofit organizations. Strategy has been having its day.  And, even when you find that good paper that considers environments, I fear that it’s not likely to be pushing theoretical boundaries on the topic.  What theory advances we have now tend to be on the strategy side.

I raised this point in a tranquil way more than a decade ago (2011) in a paper published in Nonprofit Management & Leadership published with Jeff Brudney titled “Problems Recruiting Volunteers: Nature versus Nurture.”  This nature v. nurture distinction was meant to highlight the difference between forces that we have no control over and those that organizational actors can manipulate. Spoiler alert: Both nature and nuture characteristics have a relationship to reported struggles to recruit volunteers. We concluded with a gentle encouragement for scholars to consider both when trying to explain organization outcomes.

Fast forward to today, when you can read my new NVSQ paper with Nara Yoon titled “Manager Control Over Outcomes? Nature and Nurture Over Time.” This time, the conceptual argument is somewhat more brusque. The paper returns to the original Hager/Brudney respondents for new assessments of their characteristics, strategies, and outcomes. Whereas the 2011 paper considered cross-sectional associations, this new paper is able to discern how nature and nurture characteristics are related to changes in outcomes over a 16-year period. Same spoiler alert: Both still matter. That said, the influence of nature is more pronounced in the longitudinal case than in the cross-sectional case.

What do I mean by brusque? For me, the real contribution of this paper is that we have doubled-down on the conceptual argument that environments (nature) are just as important and should get as much attention in scholarly research as strategy (nurture). Whereas that argument fell into the background of the 2011 paper, it is front and center here. We bring back the old ideas that core competencies are established in an organization’s founding days, and that it can be dangerous to try to change direction in later life. We emphasize the population ecology concept of structural inertia, borrowing the argument that not changing with the times may be safer than strategic adjustment. Our literature has a big hole if we fail to consider the nature side.

There are empirical findings here, too, about what characteristics or strategies might derive more benefits from volunteers, or fewer challenges in engaging them, or greater retention over time. My co-author Nara discusses these kinds of contributions in a Linkedin article. For my money, the bang is in our continuing encouragement for scholars to give equal time to forces over which managers have little control, like the environments they operate in. Sometime we kill a plant by not watering it, but sometimes there’s just nothing we can do to save it.

Click here to read the full open access article: Hager, M. A., & Yoon, N. (2023). Manager Control Over Outcomes? Nature and Nurture Over Time. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08997640231212840.