The Impact of Environmental Influencing Forces on the Governance Paradigm of a Non For Profit Organisation--An Engagement Based Study

摘要

This study seeks to explore and validate the multi theory proposition that the governance paradigm of an organisation extends be yond the confines of the agency theory to include the impact of its wider environmental influencing forces. The organisation subject to this study is the university, a non for profit organisation that is a part of a significant multi billion local and global industry. A series of interviews with chief audit executives (CAE's) of Australian public universities were under taken to seek their views on the wider influencing forces impacting on their governance spectrum. The views of CAE's from a selected number of overseas universities from the United Kingdom, Amsterdam and Belgium were also obtained for comparison purposes and provide an international perspective to the validation process. The findings confirm the theoretical proposition by establishing that the governance paradigm for each universi ty is impacted at different levels by a number of influencing forces drawn from agency theory and a range of management based theories. These differ ent levels of impact have a corresponding impact on its governance practices thus justifying the need for different governance components and processes at the micro level for each university or similar groupings of universities within the same industry or sector. The findings have policy implicatious for govern ance guidelines and contribute to the literature on governance and the grow ing importance of engagement based studies as a basis to explore and vali date new dimensions in the governance paradigm. It also provides avenues for further research to validate the findings with corporate entities.