Name Ziva Sharp
B.A. / B.Sc. 1977 – 1980 BA in English Literature and Linguistics, Bar Ilan University
M.A / M.Sc. 2000 – 2001 EMBA Business Administration Bar Ilan University
2004 - 2006 – Thesis, Business Administration Ben Gurion University
Name of advisor – Dr David Brock
Title of thesis - Strategic Planning in VNPOs - A Case Study Approach
The current paper examines strategic processes in Voluntary Nonprofit Organizations (VNPO) using a case study approach.
The case study analyses a strategic process in a major Israeli VNPO, Yad Sarah, a nation-wide health services organization.
VNPOs are characterized in the literature as value-centric organizations, oriented to the fulfillment of a social mission.
Existing research of strategic processes in VNPOs has focused on the inhibition of the process, emphasizing the organization’s
tendency to resist change in order to protect its values, mission-oriented identity, and the motivation of its volunteers, and thus
ensure its survival. Previous studies have reported the hostile response of the VNPO, and the avoidance or partial undertaking
of strategic processes. The current paper supports such findings. However, a key contribution of the paper, as reflected in the
case study analysis, is that the behavior pattern of the VNPO in a strategic process is not strictly defensive. Indeed, the VNPO
can effectively execute and implement a strategic process, and the organization’s response to the process exhibits both enabling
and defensive behaviors. Moreover, key aspects of the VNPO’s behavior serve a dual role, functioning simultaneously as both
inhibitors and enablers of the strategic process. In the attempt to model patterns of VNPO behavior that can facilitate a strategic
process despite the inherent conservatism of such organizations, the current research introduces a two-dimensional scheme, based
on the distinction between “scope” and “mode”, for mapping an organization’s possible patterns of response to a strategic process.
Along the “scope” axis, an organization may undertake a systemic (that is, all-encompassing) or sectional (that is, partial) strategic
process. Along the “mode” axis, the pattern of response may be organic or mechanistic. Within this framework, it is proposed that
VNPOs, facing the need for strategic change despite organizational defensiveness, will tend to adopt a sectional-organic pattern of
response. The study also suggests an extension of the organic model, based on the identification of a set of “mechanisms of interpretation”
which are utilized by the VNPO in implementation of the strategic process. Mechanisms of interpretation, such as the use of dual
meanings and ambiguity, and the positioning of the organization, rather than management alone, as an interpreter of the strategic
plan, allow the VNPO to effectively implement a new strategy, while protecting the organization from the risks and vulnerabilities
to which the volunteer-dependent, value-centric VNPO organization is exposed in undertaking a strategic process.