Facteurs qui influencent la rémunération des dirigeants d’OBNL ?

L’établissement d’une juste rémunération dans toute organisation est un domaine assez complexe. Mais, dans les entreprises à but non lucratif, c’est souvent un défi de taille et un dilemme !

Lorsque l’on gère l’argent qui vient, en grande partie, du public, on est souvent mal à l’aise pour offrir des rémunérations comparables au secteur privé. Les comparatifs ne sont pas faciles à établir…

Cependant, il faut que l’organisation paie une rémunération convenable ; sinon, elle ne pourra pas retenir les meilleurs talents et faire croître l’entreprise.

Bien sûr, la situation a beaucoup évolué au cours des 30 dernières années. On conçoit plus facilement maintenant que les services rendus pour gérer de telles organisations doivent être rémunérés à leur juste valeur. Mais, le secteur des OBNL est encore dominé par des salaires relativement bas et par la contribution de généreux bénévoles…

Publications de Gouvernance Expert – Gestion PME et OBNL

Contrairement à la plupart des entreprises privées, les OBNL rémunèrent leur personnel selon un salaire fixe. Cependant, les comparaisons avec le secteur privé ont amené plusieurs OBNL à offrir des rémunérations basées sur la performance (ex. : les résultats de la collecte de fonds, la compression des dépenses, les surplus dégagés).

Dans la plupart des OBNL, les augmentations de salaires des dirigeants demeurent des sujets chauds… très chauds, étant donné les moyens limités de ces organisations, la propension à faire appel au bénévolat et les contraintes liées aux missions sociales.

Les auteurs de l’étude ont développé trois hypothèses pour expliquer les comportements de rémunération dans le secteur des entreprises à but non lucratif :

1. Les PDG qui gèrent des organisations de grandes tailles seront mieux rémunérés ;
2. Les rémunérations des PDG d’OBNL ne seront pas basées sur la performance financière de leurs organisations ;
3. Les rémunérations des PDG d’OBNL ne seront pas déterminées par la liquidité financière.

En résumé, les recherches montrent que les hypothèses retenues sont validées dans presque tous les secteurs étudiés. C’est vraiment la taille et la croissance de l’organisation qui sont les facteurs déterminants dans l’établissement des rémunérations des hauts dirigeants. Dans ce secteur, la bonne performance ne doit pas être liée directement à la rémunération.

La plupart des administrateurs de ces organisations ne sont pas rémunérés, souvent pour des raisons de valeurs morales. Cependant, je crois que, si l’entreprise en a les moyens, elle doit prévoir une certaine forme de rémunération pour les administrateurs qui ont les mêmes responsabilités fiduciaires que les administrateurs des entreprises privées.

Je crois personnellement qu’une certaine compensation est de mise, même si celle-ci n’est pas élevée. Les administrateurs se sentiront toujours plus redevables s’ils retirent une rémunération pour leur travail. Même si la rétribution est minimale, elle contribuera certainement à les mobiliser davantage.

Cette citation résume assez bien les conclusions de l’étude :

One final implication of our analysis bears on the enduring performance-measurement quandary that confronts so many nonprofit organizations. We believe that nonprofits may rely on organizational size to make compensation decisions, drawing on free cash flows when available, rather than addressing the challenge of defining, quantifying, and measuring the social benefits that they produce. Nonprofits typically produce services that are complex and that generate not only direct outputs but also indirect, long-term, and societal benefits. These types of services often make it difficult to both develop good outcome measures and establish causality between program activity and impact. In the absence of effective metrics of social performance and mission accomplishment, many organizations rely on other factors in setting compensation. Perhaps, once better measures of mission fulfillment are developed and actively implemented, nonprofits will be able to structure CEO compensation in ways that provide appropriate incentives to managers who successfully advance the missions of nonprofit organizations, while respecting the full legal and ethical implications of the nondistribution constraint.

Pour plus d’information concernant le détail de l’étude, je vous conseille de prendre connaissance des extraits suivants.

Bonne lecture !

What Drives Nonprofit Executive Compensation?

To test our first hypothesis, we relied on two variables: lagged total fixed assets and lagged total program expenses. We chose total fixed assets as a proxy for scale of operations and total program expenses as a measure of the annual budget.15 To test our second hypothesis, we developed two variables associated with pay-for-performance compensation: administrative efficiency and dollar growth in contributed revenue.16 To test our third hypothesis, we selected three variables that determine whether an organization is cash constrained or has free cash flows: lagged commercial revenue, liquid assets to expenses measure, and investment portfolio to total assets measure.17

Since the nonprofit industry is quite heterogeneous, we explored the compensation question in the major subsectors: arts, education, health, human services, “other,” and religion.18

Arts

The compensation of arts CEOs increases more rapidly relative to program expenses than in the other subsectors, and the remuneration of arts CEOs is negatively associated with commercial revenue share. This stands in contrast to the positive relation of this factor in the remaining subsectors.

Greater administrative efficiency, higher liquidity, and a more extensive endowment are associated with higher compensation, but generating additional contributions is not. Overall, the organizational-size variables explain a substantially greater proportion of the variation in compensation for arts CEOs than the other two factors combined.

Education

While arts executive pay is closely related to program expenses, CEOs at educational institutions receive compensation that is significantly associated with fixed assets. These organizations include primary and secondary schools, as well as colleges and universities. Unlike the arts CEOs, educational leaders are better compensated when their organizations have growth in contributions but not when they are more administratively efficient.

Health

Due to the competition in the health subsector between for-profit and nonprofit firms, one might expect that compensation would be more heavily weighted toward the pay-for-performance variables. Instead, we found that CEO compensation in this subsector is strongly related to organizational size. It is weakly tied to administrative efficiency, and is not significantly related to growth in contributions. From these results, we concluded that compensation in the health subsector is not closely tied to classic pay-for-performance measures.

With regard to free cash flows, we found that the sensitivity of CEO remuneration to increases in the commercial revenue share is highest in the health subsector. Health CEO remuneration is also quite sensitive to the relative size of the endowment. We found no significant relation between health CEO compensation and liquidity. Overall, the organization-size variables explain a greater portion of the variation in pay in the health subsector than the pay-for-performance and free cash flow variables combined.

Human Services and “Other”

CEO compensation in the human-services and “other” subsectors exhibit considerable similarities in the magnitude of the coefficients. Total program expenses are significantly related to compensation, with a $10–$11 gain in compensation for each $1,000 increase in program expenses. In neither case are total fixed assets significantly associated with remuneration. CEOs in both subsectors can expect to be financially rewarded for greater administrative efficiency and when the share of commercial revenue is higher and the relative size of the investment portfolio is larger. One striking difference is that CEOs in the other subsectors receive substantially higher compensation when contributions are increased, while CEOs of human-service providers oddly receive significantly lower compensation when liquidity is higher. In both subsectors, the organizational-size variables had more power to explain compensation than the other two variable groups combined.

Religion

Compensation for religious leaders differs substantially from the other sectors. First, “base” pay and both organizational-size variables are insignificant. In the area of pay-for-performance, the regression results indicate that compensation is not directly associated with growth in contributions. More unusually, it is negatively related to administrative efficiency. In one regard, the CEOs of religious organizations are similar to their counterparts: their compensation is significantly associated with the commercial-revenue share and the relative size of the investment portfolio. For CEOs of this subsector, the size hypothesis was most strongly supported, but it did not dominate the other two hypotheses combined.

Conclusions

We found that nonprofit CEOs are paid a base salary, and many CEOs also receive additional pay associated with larger organizational size. Our results indicate that while pay-for-performance is a factor in determining compensation, it is not prominent. In fact, in all the subsectors we studied, CEO compensation is more sensitive to organizational size and free cash flows than to performance. While our analysis suggests that nonprofits may not literally be violating the nondistribution constraint, we did find evidence that CEO compensation is significantly higher in the presence of free cash flows. In only one subsector (education), however, did we find evidence that free cash flow is a central factor.

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*This article is adapted from “The Price of Doing Good: Executive Compensation in Nonprofit Organizations,” an article by the authors published in the August 2010 issue (volume 29, issue 3) of Policy and Society, an Elsevier/ ScienceDirect publication. The original report can be accessed here.