Interorganizational Cooperation: How Effective for Grassroots Organizations?

Abstract

The study empirically examined the value of interorganizational rela tions to voluntary associations; the data are from questionnaires sent to rape crisis centers in the United States. Interorganizational cooperation was studied as it was associated with structural variations and as it affected organizational effectiveness. No relationship was found between structure and cooperation; however, centers with staff tended to have community ties and more of them. The more centralized the decision making, the more organizational contacts; the difference between this and previous research seems to be due to differences in conceptualization of centralization. Cooperation was not found to be related to demands for services or speakers; there was a relationship to the extent of programs designed to train agency personnel. The number of interorganizational contacts was directly related to the number of volunteers active in a center and to the number of minority-group members. It was concluded that there are no benefits from expending undue effort to make commun ity contact, nor are politically oriented groups, which eschew formal relations, necessarily handicapped.