“Culture Is What You See When Compliance Is Not in the Room”: Organizational Culture as an Explanatory Factor in Analyzing Recent INGO Scandals

Vijfeijken Tosca Bruno- van ()
Additional contact information
Vijfeijken Tosca Bruno- van: Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 346J Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-1100, USA

Nonprofit Policy Forum, 2019, vol. 10, issue 4, 9

Abstract: In recent years, leading international nongovernmental organizations (INGO) such as Oxfam International, Save the Children, and Amnesty International have been implicated in scandals about sexual abuse and other forms of abuse of power and harassment. I suggest focusing on organizational and sectoral culture as an explanatory variable for these crises, which are particularly hard hitting for purportedly value-based organizations. In the case of NGOs, in my observation as a practitioner and ‘pracademic’, these are driven by six factors:(1) particular individual leadership traits that may be prevalent especially in the emergency and humanitarian relief related sector; (2) the effect of power on leaders’ perspectives and behaviors; (3) a culture of silence that makes it hard for NGO staff to speak up about toxic workplace behaviors; (4) the presence of deep power structures within NGOs which are not openly acknowledged and therefore addressed; (5) the myth of own innocence that leads NGOs to treat wrong doing as aberrations instead of systemic problems; and finally (6) a culture of limited individual and team-level accountability practices. The extent to which these cultural failures can be addressed through formal policy and (self)regulatory measures is limited, given that culture is primarily about informal, covert belief systems. NGOs will have to do sustained and disciplined culture work themselves if the roots of the scandals are to be taken away.

Keywords: organizational culture; INGO; scandal; cultural failure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/npf-2019-0031 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:nonpfo:v:10:y:2019:i:4:p:9:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/npf/html

DOI: 10.1515/npf-2019-0031

Access Statistics for this article

Nonprofit Policy Forum is currently edited by Dennis Young

More articles in Nonprofit Policy Forum from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().