Work + Life = Balance? Hauptamtliche in kleinen und mittleren Nonprofit-Organisationen

Abstract

For many small and medium-sized nonprofit organizations, professional employees are of vital importance. They provide the majority of daily business operations, organize the employment of volunteers, ensure the fluent procedure of financial and tax matters and represent the interests and objectives of their organization. Thus they are not just part of a socially relevant topic, but are also of a significant economical relevance: externally as service providers in the economic sense, as well as internally within their organizations. Third sector organizations have increasingly been challenged in the past years. On one hand, they take on a growing amount of responsibility in addressing social issues such as demographic change. On the other hand, the external demands on the organizations in terms of financial and labor efficiency are rising. This will also have an impact on the working conditions in the third sector. The aim of this study was to investigate the situation of professional employees in small and medium-sized nonprofit organizations with a qualitative research. The main issue is to determine the perception of working conditions and the working environment by the employees themselves, and the impact of their work to other areas of life. The database for the study consists of five interviews that were analyzed on the basis of the research style of "Grounded Theory". This made it possible to dispense with a hypothesis, and to allow instead a wide a range of individual perceptions and opinions. The categories inductively formed from the data have been examined in a qualitative content analysis, reviewed and consolidated into subject-related theoretical approaches. (author's abstract)