A Humanistic Approach to Understanding Nonprofits' Policy Advocacy: Considering Organizational Leadership-HRM Fit and Employee Engagement

Background: In recent years, humanistic management has gained importance in nonprofits. And as nonprofits have become more involved in social governance, policy advocacy as an organizational goal has also received attention. Research has found that leadership and human resource management (HRM) can promote policy advocacy, but there is a lack of attention to the interaction between the two. Therefore, this study takes a humanistic perspective, based on Denhardt's theories of public organizations and person-organization fit theory, focusing on the collective psychological ownership and individual impact of individuals within organizations, and constructs a framework for the influence of leadership-HRM fit on policy advocacy.

Method: Data were collected from 954 social work institutions and 5942 social workers in 57 cities from the 2019 China Social Work Longitudinal Study (CSWLS). These institutions had the civil affairs department as the competent authority in 77.46% of the cases, with an average establishment of 4.99 years, an average staff size of 27.92, and about 73.90% of the institutions functionally positioned as comprehensive services.

The unit of analysis was nonprofits, where the core explanatory and dependent variables are organizational level variables, but the mediating variables are individual level variables, so a multilevel structural equation model (MSEM) was used for the analysis.

Results: The results showed that leadership-HRM fit facilitated policy advocacy in nonprofits (0.055^***). Also, leadership-HRM fit had a significant effect on collective psychological ownership (p<0.05) while collective psychological ownership had a significant effect on individual impact of organizational members (p<0.001), and finally individual impact had a significant effect on policy advocacy (p<0.01). The results of the simultaneous mediating effects analysis showed that collective psychological ownership and individual impact mediated the relationship between leadership-HRM fit and policy advocacy (0.002^*). In addition, ideological absorption reinforced the facilitative effect of leadership-HRM fit on collective psychological ownership (0.467^*) and policy advocacy (0.005^*).

Implications: The findings extend the scope of the application and connotations of Denhardt’s theories on public organizations by internalizing the influence of the environment into the influence of individuals. This shift also provides guidance for nonprofits to enhance their people management and better achieve their goals. First, nonprofits should implement humanistic management and focus on the development of individuals. Second, nonprofits should pay attention to the respective choices of leadership and HRM while also paying attention to the degree of fit between them. Finally, nonprofits should proactively adapt to the political environment in which they operate in order to facilitate the achievement of policy advocacy goals.