African American Chief Operations Officers and their perspectives of human performance improvement in African American nonprofit organizations.

摘要

This study explored African American nonprofit Chief Operations Officers' (COOs') perceptions of how cultural factors influence their nonprofit work specifically in the area of human performance improvement and technology. The problem that many African American nonprofit organizations struggle to survive and sustain their operations in today's challenging nonprofit climate was part of the equation that precipitated this research project. Understanding how cultural factors such as racism, poverty, and community influences human performance improvement and technologies (HPI/HPT) for African Americans and their respective nonprofit organizations provides useful insight for African American COOs, the African American nonprofit sector, HPI/HPT practitioners, scholars, and learners across a variety of disciplines. The African American COO participants were selected because of their unique role in the African American community. Existing African American nonprofit literature focuses on services quality and implications of critical race theory. The qualitative method of personal narrative inquiry allowed me to carefully integrate my African American researcher-participant voice with the narrative data collection and analysis of this inquiry. The data analysis suggests that participating COOs had similar opinions that cultural factors do impact their performance improvement activities and efforts in their nonprofit disciplines. Findings also suggest that racism and other adversity challenging African Americans impacts African American nonprofit organizations, while the process did illuminate their pride, strength and resiliency as cultural institutions. HPI/HPT practitioners should pay close and sensitive attention to racial, social, and economic cultural factors, and maximize cultural attributes and strengths when working with African American nonprofit organizations.