Frenemies for Good: The Paradox of Collaboration and Competition Among Nonprofit Organizations

Abstract

Nonprofit organizations are expected to collaborate with peers to advance social good while simultaneously competing for scarce resources such as funding, volunteers, and legitimacy. This paradox of “coopetition” has been explored structurally, but less is known about how nonprofit employees themselves communicate these tensions. Drawing on 82 hours of meeting data from a mid-sized U.S. nonprofit, this exploratory study examined moments where employees explicitly discussed both collaboration and competition. Constant comparative analysis revealed three themes that represent communicative mechanisms through which employees made the tension between collaboration and competition manageable: framing coopetition as benefiting the community, admiring and replicating others’ practices, and setting boundary conditions on collaboration and competition. These findings demonstrate how nonprofit employees in meetings reframed both collaboration and competition as community-oriented while also setting boundaries around when and how each occurs. Competitive talk became acceptable through communicative mechanisms including moral reframing, allowing employees to reconcile competition with nonprofit norms. This research offers nonprofit leaders insight into how everyday meeting talk shapes collaboration and competition, illustrating how employees can acknowledge competitive realities while preserving legitimacy and a shared sense of mission. Theoretically, this study extends paradox theory by examining how the collaboration–competition paradox is communicatively managed in organizational meetings.