Discuss the influence of Greco-Roman understanding of stewardship on non-profit leadership today based upon Brinkerhoff and Wilson.
The Greco-Roman understanding of stewardship is based heavily on the past biblical leadership models. As the bible explains in both the book of Genesis 1:28-30 and Paul 4:10, those who follow the bible are Gods representatives who manage his creation and spiritual resources as faithful stewards. These biblical principles combined with the Greco-Roman interpretation of them, underpin the concept of stewardship as it applies to non-profit leadership. Essentially, a steward is an individual or group that faithfully and efficiently managers the resources of others. They manager these resources with from the perspective of the owner and act accordingly. We see this concept in both modern day profit and non-profit organizations. Profit organization such as publicly traded companies have a CEO who is the steward of investor capital. Likewise, nonprofit organizations often have leaders who are stewards of societal capital in the form of taxpayer funded grants, individual donations, or other tax benefits. These benefits are designed to help provide incentive for nonprofits...
Here, the leadership of the organization must allocate societal capital to the highest and best use possible. Unfortunately, the criteria used, and the overall results vary dramatically (Zhu, 2016). A...
…must continue to manage resources efficiency, particularly in a much more dynamic and competitive marketplace. Non-profit organizations are continuing to grow in number. As such the ability to generate a natural funding constituency is critical to the long-term viability of the non-profit. To create a natural funding constituency, it is important for non-profit leaders to be strong stewards of societal capital. Here, many of the Greco-Roman principles come into
play. For example, nonprofit leaders must be able to model the behavior they expect their subordinates to mimic. They must have clear performance objectives and monitor them on a continual basis. They should reward top performers and look to maximize efficiency…
