Editor’s Note: In June 2016, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society hosted its third Junior Scholars Forum. The following article covers a not-yet-published research paper presented there. To learn more about the research, readers can contact the paper’s author, Aline Gatignon ([email protected]).
(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
In 2002, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) joined forces with the global logistics provider TNT to create Moving the World, one of the largest-ever partnerships of its kind. This corporate-nonprofit collaboration went well beyond the traditional model in which a company makes cash donations to an NGO. It followed a “secondment” model that involved assigning TNT employees to work inside WFP.
“Today, there’s more enthusiasm for these [sorts of] partnerships,” says Aline Gatignon, assistant professor of international business and strategic management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Many corporate leaders, she adds, recognize that robust collaboration with NGOs offers a vehicle for “moving forward on socioeconomic development objectives, as well as on business objectives such as expansion into emerging markets.”
Gatignon conducted a study of the WFP-TNT partnership that covered the years from 2002 to 2012. Over that period, 586 TNT employees temporarily left their offices to work directly with WFP. They established health clinics for truck drivers along African transport corridors. They developed supply chains for WFP’s school meals program. They coordinated logistics for warehouses and airports in the aftermath of natural disasters. Altogether, they undertook 276 joint projects with WFP in 43 countries.
“The partnership became part of TNT’s DNA, particularly for business units that were closely involved in it,” says Luke Disney, a TNT employee who served as communications manager for the partnership from 2004 to 2006. (He is now executive director of North Star Alliance, an international health services NGO.) During the Asian tsunamis in 2004 and 2005, Disney recalls, the level of engagement throughout the company skyrocketed. Its board of directors even requested daily briefings on how TNT was helping WFP’s emergency response team.
But challenges emerged as TNT employees worked to navigate between a corporate environment and a nonprofit setting. Some of them, for example, felt a sense of culture shock when their secondment ended and they returned to their regular jobs. “When you have spent three months feeding children in rural Malawi and fixing up their school, returning to work on a sorting line is going to make you ask some tricky questions about yourself and your life,” Disney says.
In her study of Moving the World, Gatignon investigated three aspects of the secondment experience as it applied to TNT employees: interpersonal coordination (interacting with people at WFP), employee learning (gaining local knowledge about emerging markets), and “identity strain” (feeling a tension between affiliation with TNT and affiliation with WFP or the partnership). Both TNT and WFP granted her access to material that documented the partnership, including videos, personnel files, presentations, and online posts written by TNT employees. In addition, Gatignon surveyed 175 participants from TNT. She coded this source material and then used regression techniques to measure the effects that coordination, learning, and identity had on Moving the World participants.
Overall, Gatignon found, TNT employees were able to coordinate successfully with their counterparts at WFP, and they learned a great deal from this collaboration as well. According to Gatignon, WFP staff members reported that TNT employees— unlike people from a consulting firm, for example—truly became part of the WFP team. And TNT employees reported that their WFP colleagues helped them understand how they could adapt their logistics capabilities to an emerging market context. Unfortunately, Gatignon discovered, many TNT employees experienced identity strain during or after their secondment to WFP.
For that reason, among others, corporate-nonprofit partnerships require careful management. On each side of a partnership, leaders need to ensure that employees don’t clash in their expectations, methods, or solutions that they see for a project. “This is particularly important, because employees from different sectors are socialized very differently,” says Christine Bode, assistant professor of management at Bocconi University in Milan, who studies corporate social engagement. The key to reducing such tensions, Bode suggests, lies in the way that leaders structure a partnership: “To move past some of the negative stereotypes that employees from different sectors have [about each other] and to reconcile expectations, the partnership has to be based on mutual decision making, agreement on joint goals, and maximum involvement from both sides.”
Corporate leaders also need to manage the impact that an NGO partnership can have on their own organization. Disney and his team at TNT created opportunities for returning employees to talk about their Moving the World experiences in a structured setting. In addition, TNT executives went on field trips to WFP sites so that they could fully appreciate the nature of their employees’ secondment work. “Over time, managers realized that identity strain could be an issue for returning employees,” Gatignon says. “But they also became better able to manage both the secondment and reintegration phases.”
Aline Gatignon, “There and Back Again: Coordination, Learning and Identity in Nonprofit Secondments to Emerging Markets,” 2016.
Read more stories by Corey Binns.