Strategic Management Practices as a Key Determinant of Superior Non-Governmental Organizations Performance: Survey from International NGos in the Palestinian Territories

Strategic management is intended to assist organizations to cope with and adapt to their changing internal and external circumstances. It can help clarify and resolve the most important critical issues they encounter. It enables them to build on strengths, take advantage of opportunities, and achieve higher financial and non financial performance. The aim of this thesis was to examine the strategic management practices and performance relationship in the Non-governmental sector. Previous studies have mainly addressed the relationship between single practice of strategic management and financial performance and did take into account neither the whole process of strategic management nor the other non-financial measures of the performance in these organizations. A survey tool was developed and validated to measure strategic management practices and NGOs financial and non-financial performance. Surveys were distributed to project coordinators, program officers and administration officers of seventy-nine international NGOs operating in the Palestinian Territories. 237 surveys were distributed, 160 surveys were returned and were usable for statistical analysis. The findings of the research, using correlation and regression analysis, indicate that strategic management has an impact on the financial and nonfinancial performance in the non-governmental sector in which strategy implementation showed to play the most important role in NGOs performance. Furthermore, organizational and individual factors did not contribute to have an effect on the research variables. In addition, the findings of the research suggest that an expansion of the coverage of surveys and an extension of the study to include also other local non-governmental organizations. Further, it is suggested that researchers can extend the investigation to examine the relationship including some variables that, such as donors policies, conditional funding and external constrains, to understand better the relationship in this sector.