Advisory Board Performance: Managing Ambiguity and Limited Commitment in Public Television

Abstract

Citizen advisory boards are important to non-profit and governmental organiza tions, yet these boards face fundamental problems of ambiguous responsibilities and limited board member commitment. In the present paper a model of these proposi tions is developed and tested. Board performance is operationalized as productivity and board impact, and is expected to be dependent on the development of opera tional objectives and a subcommittee structure, which in turn is facilitated by the financial support of management, and impeded by a large board membership. The model is tested using path analysis on a national sample of federally-mandated Community Advisory Boards to public television stations. We find that the estab lishment of operational objectives and subcommittees is significantly associated with productivity but only weakly with the impact of the advisory board. Board size is unassociated with board performance. The findings support the assertion that successful boards must clarify their roles and develop efficient operating structures, but suggest that the advisory board-management relationship is complex.