Nonprofits’ Governance and Accountability Practices: A cross-national empirical study

This article aims to increase the knowledge of nonprofit organizations (NPOs), focusing on the issues of governance and accountability. These strictly connected topics are widely discussed in the literature, but few empirical studies are proposed, especially considering the organizations from more countries. This work tries to fill some gaps in the literature with an empirical study on a random sample of 1000 nonprofit organizations from six different countries and some interesting results emerged. We found that all the studied variables of governance (board size, board committees, CEO duality, and CEO woman) and accountability (social reports, social media, and strategic plan) are positively related with the organization performance. Furthermore, we also verified the existence of associations between some of such variables and the organization’s size. All these findings allow us to provide suggestions about good governance and accountability practices useful both for the managers and for the policymakers.