Abstract

International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) include widely separated offices that employ staff who hold diverse values. This ethnographic study builds upon seventy-six semi-structured, open-ended interviews with staff members from four NGOs to explore three major tensions between NGO headquarters and field offices. These three tensions involve: (i) NGOs' field-oriented versus organizationally-oriented focus, (ii) the similarity versus diversity of their staff, and (iii) the flexibility versus consistency of their administration.

While headquarters attends to organizational activities, field offices focus more narrowly on program activities. The resulting tension is most acute when an NGO recruits and trains its staff. NGOs employ different criteria that concern not only skills, expertise and knowledge, but also flexibility, sensitivity, honesty, the ability to listen and learn and the capacity to tolerate others. When NGOs train staff, they draw upon staff members' latent abilities rather than importing unfamiliar knowledge, skills and values.

While headquarters seek similarity among staff members sharing common organizational objectives, field offices seek staff diversity as organizational resources to address complex problems. To maintain similarity without sacrificing diversity, staff members develop a sense of commonality through the use of rituals and narratives and by setting aside time to build cohesion. To maintain diversity without losing similarity, they take their differences for granted and retain their ownership in various activities.

While headquarters emphasizes organizational consistency to avoid chaos, field offices try to remain flexible to address changing problems in the field. To balance fiexibility and consistency, NGO staff members try to broaden their own views, to refrain from implementing system requirements mechanically and to use ambiguity as a source of opportunity.

Lessons drawn from this research inform the practice of headquarters and field offices as they relate to each other and to donors. NGOs' effectiveness is likely to increase as staff assess organizational processes carefully, take long-term perspectives, become willing and able to take risks, make use of their mistakes, and seek new understandings of the problems they face.