Measuring the Effectiveness of Nonprofit Boards

Abstract

The Board Self-Assessment Questionnaire (BSAQ) was developed to assess board performance in six areas that previous research has shown to characterize highly effective boards. Data from 623 board members in 34 nonprofit organizations were used to examine this instrument's reliability, validity, and sensitivity, including the relationship between board scores and selected indicators of the organization's financial performance. Results indicate that the BSAQ is a sound and useful tool for evaluating board performance.

Effective board governance of safe care: a (theoretically underpinned) cross-sectioned examination of the breadth and depth of relationships through national quantitative surveys and in-depth qualitative case studies

“…As in previous research, 29,42,44,45 this analysis has shown the validity of the six BSAQ dimensions. The study improves on previous analyses by doing a factor analysis applied to ordinal data, calculating both factor scores and factor-based scales and developing a composite BSAQ score from the factor scores.…”

“…29,42,44,45 Contribution of items in the common factor Each of the dimensions in BSAQ has a number of questions that load onto that dimension; for example, there are 12 questions/items in the contextual domain, but only eight questions/items in the political domain. The factor loadings presented in Table 10 indicate the extent to which each of the items correlate with the underlying factor.…”

“…Since its development, it has undergone extensive analysis of reliability, validity, and sensitivity. 43,44 It has also been used to assess board effectiveness in non-profit US hospitals 45 and in one small study of UK NHS trusts. 29 As this was the first major study using BSAQ in the UK context, we first tested the data structure of the instrument in that setting.…”

“…The BSAQ has subsequently been subject to extensive testing for validity, reliability and sensitivity, and this process confirmed that the six theoretically derived dimensions also had some empirical distinctiveness. 44,45 These six dimensions are labelled: contextual, educational, interpersonal, analytical, political and strategic (Box 1 provides more details). Four of these dimensions relate directly to Garratt's instrumental board tasks (located in Table 1) and the remaining two (educational and interpersonal) are more behavioural, reflecting recognition of the need for boards to develop group cohesion, reflection and development.…”

Board Accountability: Lessons from the Field

“…They made use of the findings from their assessments to identify areas, issues, or practices in which they wanted to strengthen the board' s performance (Jackson and Holland, 1998, report one such approach).…”