Influence of the Influential Networks in NPO

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1 Leader Qualification in Managing Nonprofit Organization Naohiro Matsumura 1 and Yoshihiro Sasaki 1 Osaka University, Osaka , Japan Abstract. Qualification that a leader should satisfy in managing nonprofit organization (NPO) is revealed by integrating the analysis of questionnaire survey and mailing list archives. Questionnaire survey is applied to 104 members in dot-jp, the specific nonprofit organization in Japan. Mailing list archives are analyzed by applying the IDM (Influence Diffusion Model) that measures the influential and influenced values for each member. According to the results of this paper, a leader should catch members messages as well as throw messages to construct trust relationships. Otherwise, the leader become self-righteous, and make members complaint about the organization. 1 Introduction NPO (NonProfit Organization) is an organization where members are engaged in social activity apart from administration and commercial business. After NPO law to promote specified nonprofit activities was established in Dec in Japan, more NPOs have been established than before. Actually, we can trace the number of authorized NPOs at a government web site listing 1,000 NPOs in Nov. 1999, 5,000 NPOs in Oct. 2001, 10,000 NPOs in Feb. 2003, 18,000 NPOs in Sep The boom reflects the growing needs of citizens to take part in social activities. At the same time, however, it revealed the difficulty of NPO management. This difficulty comes from the mission of NPO, voluntarism of members, and the scale of organization: The primary mission of NPO is the public benefits, not the profitability. Changing the mission is justified in profit-driven organization if more profit is promising, whereas not in NPO. The commitment of citizens to NPO depends on their voluntarism, not on their obligation. Therefore, managers can t force members to work for NPO. As the number of members increases, sharing mission becomes a challenge and weaken members voluntarism. Much research showed that the relationships between members were crucial properties in an organization for making the most of human and knowledge capital [1 3]. In the ongoing project regarding NPO research [4], the aspects of capital, scale of operation, human resources, partnerships with government and organizations has been illuminated. Yet the relationship between NPO members is not investigated although it is quite relevant to sharing missions and motivating voluntarism. In this paper, we target dot-jp 2, a NPO established in 2000, to reveal leader qualification by integrating questionnaire survey and mailing list analysis. The reminder of this paper proceeds as follows. In Section 2, we briefly introduce the aim, activity, and operataion manner of dot-jp. We then present the questionnaire survey analysis in Section 3. In Section 4, mailing list archives are analyzed to relate leader qualification. Conclusions and directions for future work are given in Section 5. 2 Overview of dot-jp dot-jp is the specified nonprofit corporation in Japan that organizes intern programs giving university students the opportunity to participate in political activities with representatives (diet members). Through the program, students learn how representatives engage in political activities in the field. A program continues six months, and about half of members are renewed when new program starts. At the beginning of each period, seminars are held several times to have students interested in the activity of dot-jp. One of main activity of dot-jp is to gather students to the seminars. Another activity is to contact with representatives, tell about intern program, and beg of them to take students in as a intern program. 1 (In Japanese) 2

2 The headquarters of dot-jp is in Osaka, and seven branch offices are distributed all over Japan according to the areas (Branch-A, Branch-B, Branch-C, Branch-D, Branch-E, Branch-F, Branch-G 3 ). Each branch office is organized by ten to twenty members, and three of which are appointed executives as follows. Area Manager (AM) : AM is the person who has responsible for managing the branch office. Seminar Manager (SM) : SM is the person who has responsible for gather students to seminars. Intern Manager (IM) : IM is a person who has the responsible for contacting with representatives. Members daily use mailing list on the Internet to exchange information, plan and arrange events, argue and agree on matters. Each branch office set numerical targets as the number of students coming to seminar/intern program in advance. The achievement of activity for each branch office is evaluated by comparing the targets with actual results. 3 Analysis 1: Questionnaire Survey Analysis 3.1 Satisfaction of Members to their Branch, AM, SM, and IM To investigate members satisfaction to their branch offices, AM, SM, and IM, we conducted questionnaire surveys to 104 members working on seven branch offices on March 2005, the last month of the period at the moment. The results and the achievement rate are shown in Table 1. Table 1. Achievement percentages and averaged satisfaction for each branch office. Averaged satisfaction (1:Satisfaction, 5:Complaint) Branch % of Achievement Branch AM SM IM Branch-A Branch-B Branch-C Branch-D Branch-E Branch-F Branch-G Based on the achievement percentages in Table 1, we can understand that the achievement of Branch- F and Branch-G was quite bad compared to other branch offices. 3.2 Statistical Analysis We applied correlation analysis to data in Table 1 to reveal the relationships between Branch, AM, SM, IM, and Achievement. The significance level for each correlation is shown in Table 2 where we can recognize that each pair of {Branch, AM} and {Branch, Achievement} has statistically significant correlation, while AM and Achievement have no significant correlations with others. 3.3 Discussions Looking at Table 1 based on the discussion in Section 3.2, we realize two noteworthy points that could not be explained yet. Members in Branch-C did not satisfy the activity of Branch-C and AM although the achievement of Branch-C is high enough. Members in Branch-G satisfied the activity of AM although their achievement was law. 3 Here we use pseudo branch names instead of real branch names to keep the secrecy.

3 Table 2. Significance levels for correlations between Branch, AM, SM, IM, and Achievement, obtained from Table 1. Branch AM SM IM Achievement Branch AM SM IM Achievement From the first point, we can presume that members satisfaction to their AM gives strong effect on the satisfaction to their branch office much more than the achievement. And, from the second point, we can suppose that members evaluate the activity of their AM apart from the achievement and the satisfaction to their branch office. To investigate these assumptions, we interviewed 10 members individually after questionnaire surveys, and found that the AM of Branch-C was not trusted by the members, whereas the AM of Branch-B won members esteem. In the next section, we will reveal leader qualification by analyzing the archives of mailing lists used in each branch office. 4 Analysis 2: Mailing List Analysis 4.1 Mailing Lists Members exchange information, plan and arrange events, argue and agree on matters on mailing list. Table 3 shows that thousands of s were exchanged during a period. Table 3. Number of members and s exchanged on 14th period (Oct Mar. 2005). Branch Branch-A Branch-B Branch-C Branch-D Branch-E Branch-F Branch-G # of members # of emals Measuring Influential and Influenced Values Let us explain the IDM (Influence Diffusion Model) [5] that we use here for analyzing the archives of s to measure the influential/influenced value for each member. In IDM, the influence between a pair of members is defined as the sum of propagating terms among them via messages. Here, let a message chain be a series of messages connected by post-reply relationships, and the influence of a message x on a message y (x precedes y) in the same message chain be i x y. Then, define i x y as i x y = w x w y, (1) where w x and w y are the set of terms in x and y respectively, and w x w y is the number of terms propagating from x to y via other messages. If x and y are not in the same message chain, I define i x y as 0 because the terms in x and y are used in a different context and there is no influence between them. Based on the influence between messages, I next measure the influence of a member p on a member q as the total influence of p s messages on the messages of others through q s messages replying to p s messages. Let the set of p s messages be α, the set of q s messages replying to any of α be β, and the message chains starting from a message z be ξ z. The influence from p onto q, j p q, is then defined as j p q = i x y. (2) x α z β y ξ z The influence of p on q is regarded as q s contribution toward the spread of p s messages.

4 Fig. 1. A message chain of four messages sent by three individuals. The influence of each member is also measurable using j p q. Let the influence of p to others be I 1 p, the influence of others to p be I 2 p, and the set of all members except p be γ. Then, I 1 p and I 2 p are defined as Ip 1 = j p q (3) q γ Ip 2 = j q p. (4) q γ As an example of measuring the influence, let us use the simple message chain in Figure 1 where solid arrows show the replies to previous messages, and dotted arrows show the flows of influence. In this case, the influential value (I 1 ) and influenced value (I 2 ) of each member is measured as shown in Table 4. Table 4. The influential/influenced values for each member. Member Anne Bobby Cathy I I By measuring influential and influence value, we can understand the roles of members in the communication [6]. In this study, we apply IDM to the archives of mailing list for each branch office to investigate leader qualification. 4.3 Leader Qualification At the questionnaire surveys we conducted, we also asked members to vote for three member whom you thought as outstanding contributors. The number of votes shows how much the member is evaluated. After measuring influential value (I 1 ) and influenced value (I 2 ) for evey members, we applied correlation analysis to the data composed of Vote (the number of votes), I 1, and I 2. The significance levels for correlations between them are shown in Table 5 where each pair of {Vote, I 1 } and {I 1, I 2 } has statistically significant correlations. These correlations might be the qualification a contributor must satisfy. To investigate this assumption, let us look at the ranking of Vote, I 1, and I 2. Table 6 shows the achievement of each branch office and the AMs ranking by vote, I 1, and I 2. The results indicate that AMs having high I 1 and I 2 also obtained much votes. We can conclude that having high I 1 and I 2 is the qualification AM should satisfy. Based on the qualification, we can interpret why the satisfaction to AM in Branch-C was low and why the satisfaction to AM in Branch-G was high. AM in Branch-C did not obtain any vote. The ranking of I 1 was high, but I 2 was quite low (14th out of 16 members). This means that the AM throw

5 Table 5. Significance level for correlations between Vote, I 1, and I 2. Vote I 1 I 2 Vote I I information to others while hardly catch any information from others. That is, the AM is considered to fail in constructing trust relationships. What is worse is that the AM believed to be a great leader. High I 1 might reduce awareness of such self-righteous situation. AM in Branch-G obtained the most votes, and I 1 and I 2 was ranked high as well. That is, the AM closely communicated with other members, and succeeded in creating trust relationships. Table 6. Achievement percentages and ranking of AM for each branch office. Ranking of AM Branch % of Achievement Vote I 1 I 2 Branch-A Branch-B Branch-C 106 N/A 2 14 Branch-D Branch-E Branch-F 79 N/A 4 8 Branch-G The trust relationships around AM can be seen from Figure 2 and 3, the graphical outputs of IDM 4, obtained from archives of Branch-A and Branch-C respectively. Figure 2 shows that the AM (depicted as p2) is involved in the communication by giving influence to five members and receiving influence from eight members. On the other hand, Figure 3 shows unequal communication where the AM (denoted as p1) gives influence to six members, and receive influence from only two members. 5 Conclusions The management of NPO is based on the members voluntarism, however members often lose it and eventually leave the organization. The reason comes from members unsatisfactory to the management policy of the organization. This study revealed the importance of trust relationships between members to maintain members satisfaction and suggested the approach to construct it. All leaders are not qualified to foster trust relationships. As a future work, we will establish a guideline to create qualified leaders. References 1. David Krackhardt and Jeffery R. Hanson: Informal Networks: The Company behind the Chart, Harvard Business Review, July-August, (1993) 2. Peter F. Drucker: Post-Capitalist Society, Harper Business, Harper Collins (1993) 3. Etienne Wenger: Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press (1999) 4. OSIPP Center for Nonprofit Research & Information: NPO 2004 White Paper The Japan Nonprofit Almanac. (2004) 5. Naohiro Matsumura: Topic Diffusion in a Community, Chance Discovery, Yukio Ohsawa and Peter McBurney (Eds.), Springer, (2003) 6. Naohiro Matsumura: Collaborative Communication Strategies in Online Community, The Fourth International Workshop on Social Intelligence Design (SID2005), Stanford, March (2005) 4 The figures are composed of top eight influential members because of the complexity.

6 p39 41 p p p p p p p41 Fig. 2. Human relationships of eight members on Branch-A where each node corresponds to a member and each arrow corresponds to the flow of influence propagating through message-chain (post-reply relationships of s). Gray node shows AM. Note that AM receive influence from everyone, and give influence to five members. p p p p p p p18 11 p2 Fig. 3. Human relationships of eight members on Branch-C. Note that AM shown as gray node gives influence to six members, whereas AM received influence from only two members.