Although scholarship has established how people with a partner, child, or other domestic obligations account for these responsibilities when making career decisions, we lack conceptual apparatus ar...

Scholars frequently investigate how nonprofit employees, as a group, differ from public or for-profit employees. However, there is less focus on how motivational profiles vary among nonprofit employees. Particularly as the nonprofit sector professionalizes, the reasons why people seek nonprofit employment are diversifying. Recent work highlights a more individualized understanding of employee motivation, which can lead to more nuanced and tailored human resource management techniques. I amplify this stream of scholarship, guided by a job fit framework and introducing a robust methodological approach from organizational psychology that accounts for interactions between an employee's work preferences and work experiences on outcomes of interest. With two waves of original data on international aid workers, I demonstrate that the experience of prosocial work (i.e., work that aims to help other people) is associated with greater job satisfaction for those with strong prosocial work preferences but can be associated with reduced job satisfaction for those without. These findings necessitate nuanced attention to employees' work preferences, moving beyond assumptions that prosocial work will universally motivate nonprofit employee performance.

To advance tailored recruitment, management, and on-the-job socialization, we present a complementary “job fit” framework that integrates intrinsic, extrinsic, relational, and prosocial job design attributes. Employing polynomial regression models and response surface analysis, we capture and display three-dimensionally whether, when, and how the match (or mismatch) between employee preferences and experiences relates to job satisfaction. Using a large, cross-national sample of public employees, we illustrate this framework and methodology through analysis of matched preferences, experiences, and job satisfaction across six job attributes. We identified that public employees’ varied experiences of job attributes have differential impacts on job satisfaction, contingent upon preferences for the attribute. The only attribute we identified that was insensitive to employee preferences was job security. We find, for example, that working with others is associated with decreased job satisfaction for those that prefer working alone. These findings support the motivating potential of complementary “job fit” and provide nuanced attention to appropriate methodologies and a broader range of job design attributes.

Foundations are often criticized as organizations of elite power facing little accountability within their own countries. Simultaneously, foundations are transnational actors that send money to, and exert influence on, foreign countries. We argue that critiques of foundation power should expand to include considerations of national sovereignty. Recently, countries across the globe have introduced efforts to restrict foreign aid, wary of the foreign influences that accompany it. However, it is unknown whether these restrictions impact foundation activity. With data on all grants from US-based foundations to NGOs based in foreign countries between 2000 and 2012, we use a difference-in-difference statistical design to assess whether restrictive laws decrease foundation activity. Our results suggest that restrictive laws rarely have a significant negative effect on the number of grants, dollars, funders, and human rights funding to a country. These results call for attention to considerations of foundation accountability in a transnational context.

<p>Local nongovernmental organizations (local NGOs) based in less economically advanced countries suffer from a “liability of foreignness” in attracting international funding: They are geographically, linguistically, and culturally distant from funders in more economically advanced countries. As a result, although U.S. foundations gave 27,572 grants to support programming occurring within less economically advanced countries between 2000 and 2012, only 10.4% went to local NGOs within those areas. We argue that while favoring NGOs in more economically advanced countries minimizes funder-NGO foreignness, or the distance between the foundation and the grantee NGO, it increases NGO-programming foreignness, or the distance between the grantee NGO and the site of their programming, creating crucial trade-offs. We draw upon organizational theory to predict under what conditions U.S. foundations would fund local NGOs, finding that local NGOs receive more support from older foundations and those with greater geographic and program area experience. Furthermore, local NGOs receive larger, longer grants but with lower probabilities of being renewed. These results identify the conditions under which foundations “go the extra mile” and fund local NGOs.</p>