Building resilient partnerships: How businesses and nonprofits create the capacity for responsiveness

Abstract

Increasingly, businesses are eager to partner with nonprofit organizations to benefit their communities. In spite of good intentions, differences between nonprofit and business organizations can limit the ability of potential partnerships to respond to a changing economic and public health landscape. Using a retrospective, multiple-case study, we sought to investigate the managerial behaviors that enabled businesses and nonprofits to be themselves together in sustainable partnerships. We recruited four nonprofit-business partnerships in the Boston area to serve as cases for our study. Each was designed to address social determinants of health. We thematically analyzed qualitative data from 113 semi-structured interviews, 9 focus groups and 29.5 h of direct observations to identify organizational capacities that build resilient partnerships. Although it is common to emphasize the similarities between partners, we found that it was the acknowledgement of difference that set partnerships up for success. This acknowledgement introduced substantial uncertainty that made managers uncomfortable. Organizations that built the internal capacity to be responsive to, but not control, one another were able to derive value from their unique assets.

Eliciting the Pivotal Role of Sustainable Performance in Linking Organizational Agility with Institutional Excellence in Hotels and Egyptian Travel Agencies

“…Today, customer needs and demands are ever-changing as a result of technological advancements (Helal, 2023); thus, hotels and travel agencies need to adapt quickly to these changes. According to Taylor et al (2023), responsiveness is a firm's capacity to recognize changes in the surrounding environment and incorporate them into existing procedures in a managed manner. Responsiveness refers to a firm's abilities to recognize and foresee alterations to their surroundings (Richey et al, 2022), as well as respond to these alterations in a reflexive or anticipatory manner (Bouguerra et al, 2021).…”

“…Another definition of responsiveness is the capacity to anticipate market situations and make timely responses (Chakraborty & Biswas, 2020). As long as hotel firms can respond effectively to changes in their environment, they may be able to gain 117 | P a g e https://jaauth.journals.ekb.eg / competitive edges (Taylor et al, 2023). This is regarded as one of the benefits that arise from competition, particularly with regard to timing (Lin et al, 2023).…”