Service delivery partnerships with local government offer both opportunities and challenges for nonprofit agencies. Legislative mandate, agency need, the policy environment, and community needs and expectations can all play a role in a local government official's willingness to partner with nonprofits. For a nonprofit manager, factors that influence decisions on partnering might include mission, training, experiential history, organizational and policy environment, and donor expectations. Collaboration can be supported by a combination of coercive, incentive-based, and normative influences.

However, little is known about why nonprofits avoid partnerships. In 2010, Beth Gazley published an article titled "Why Not Partner With Local Government?: Nonprofit Managerial Perceptions of Collaborative Disadvantage." The research focus of this article is on the possible sources of nonprofit executive directors' resistance to collaboration. The dependent variable is the score of the perceived disadvantages of collaboration (i.e., negative attitude toward collaboration) by nonprofit executive directors. Thus, the greater the value of the dependent variable, the more an executive director agreed about the potential disadvantages of collaboration. Independent variables include individual, organizational and community factors, listed inTable 1(Links to an external site.)

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) with descriptive statistics.Table 2(Links to an external site.)

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) reports OLS regression results. "Constant" in Table 2 refers to an intercept, "B" refers to coefficients, and "Beta" refers to beta coefficients (standardized coefficients).

After reviewing both tables, answer the following questions:

(1) Explain the effect of each of the following three variables, by interpreting its slope and assessing its statistical significance. Does that variable have a statistically significant impact on the perceived disadvantages of collaboration?

• Collaborative experience with local government
• Annual revenues
• Years in position

(2) Interpret Adjusted R-square.

(3) Based on beta coefficients, which are thetop threefactors in influencing the perceived disadvantages of collaboration?