Strategic organizational responses to environmental pressures: the case of three Palestinian non-governmental organizations

This dissertation belongs to the organizational psychology literature. It explores a) How the environment affects and constrains the actions and characteristics of individual organizations and b) How and Why organizations respond to external constraints the way they do. The purpose of this study is to understand NGOs as strategic organizations that enact specific behaviors in response to pressures within their environment(s). The basic concepts and premises of the institutional theory provide useful guidelines for analyzing organization–environment relationships with an emphasis on the social rules, expectations, norms, and values as the sources of pressure on organizations. Resource dependence theory, on the other hand, proceeds from the indisputable open-systems proposition that organizations are not able to internally generate all the resources required to maintain themselves and therefore must enter into exchange transactions with elements in the environment to ensure a stable flow of resources. Coupling the two theories helps to examine the ways in which an individual organization reacts to different levels of uncertainties and multiple actions of other social structures in its environment. The researcher utilized Oliver‘s (1991) hypotheses and framework that link institutional factors and organizational strategic responses to guide the research data collection and analysis. One organizational domain is used to understand the intricate relationship between organizations and their institutionalized environment—the non-governmental organization sector in Palestine. The units of analysis are the individual Palestinian non-governmental organizations (PNGOs), which are analyzed using a qualitative method of case study. A series of interviews and focus group discussion were conducted. The dissertation concludes that while PNGOs are vulnerable to varying degrees to external control given their dependence on external donors for financial resources, the uncertainty created by their dependence, and the political instability that constrains their development, they are not purely passive recipients nor complete political manipulators of institutional pressures, as the extremes of institutional and resource dependence theories postulate. Organizations have at their disposal a wide range of active choice behaviors that vary from passivity to positivity. An organization‘s choices are predictable largely in terms of their political power and the nature of the institutional pressures enacted on them.Ph.D.Includes abstractVitaIncludes bibliographical referencesby Fidaa Shehad