Nonprofit organizations play a vital role in American society. They deliver essential health, educational, and cultural services while also filling gaps left by markets and governments. Economically, nonprofits account for nearly 10 percent of private employment, contribute over a trillion dollars annually to the U.S. economy, and engage millions of volunteers (Siefer, Reference Siefer2025). Despite their importance, nonprofits face a persistent challenge: they are often expected to collaboratively solve social problems while simultaneously competing for scarce resources. Funders encourage coalitions, information sharing, and joint initiatives, framing collaboration as a marker of legitimacy (Bunger, Reference Bunger2013; Irvin, Reference Irvin, Seaman and Young2010). Yet the same organizations must differentiate themselves to secure grants, donations, clients, and media attention (Barman, Reference Barman2002; Eckerd et al., Reference Eckerd, Fowles, Daniel and Sandel2023). This paradox forces nonprofits to “stand out” and “work together” at the same time. While scholarship has examined the structural and strategic aspects of collaboration and competition (e.g., Harrison & Thornton, Reference Harrison and Thornton2022; Paarlberg & Hwang, Reference Paarlberg and Hwang2017), less is known about how nonprofit employees themselves talk through these tensions in practice. How members talk about cooperation and rivalry in everyday practice matters because these conversations shape organizational strategy and mission enactment. The present study drew on observational data of employees explicitly discussing collaboration and competition to explore how they navigated this paradox in real time. These results contribute to paradox theory by identifying communicative mechanisms such as moral reframing, respectful differentiation, and boundary work through which the collaboration/competition paradox is enacted in organizational meetings. While prior research has explored structural or individual responses to nonprofit coopetition, little attention has been given to meetings as sites where paradoxes are performed and normalized through routine interaction. By focusing on meetings, this study captured paradox not as a static condition, but as a communicative accomplishment and offers insight into how nonprofit employees manage competing demands in real time.
Collaboration and competition
Nonprofit organizations operate in an environment where collaboration and competition are both central to daily practice. On the one hand, nonprofits are often expected to collaborate with one another—sharing information, referring clients, co-fundraising, or pooling resources like staff and office space (Irvin, Reference Irvin, Seaman and Young2010). Funders and foundations frequently encourage or even require collaboration, framing it as a pathway to greater efficiency and stronger community outcomes (Gazley & Guo, Reference Gazley and Guo2020). At the same time, however, nonprofits compete for many of the same finite resources, including grants, donations, volunteers, media attention, and even clients (Irvin, Reference Irvin, Seaman and Young2010). Leaders are acutely aware that emphasizing their organization’s distinctiveness can be necessary to secure funding (Barman, Reference Barman2002) even as they also face pressures to “play nice” with peer organizations to maintain legitimacy in the nonprofit ecosystem. This dual reality—collaborating to achieve shared social goals while competing for scarce resources—creates a complex environment that nonprofit employees and leaders must navigate on an ongoing basis.
Scholars use the term coopetition to describe situations in which organizations simultaneously collaborate and compete. Bengtsson and Kock (Reference Bengtsson and Kock2000) defined coopetition as “a dynamic and paradoxical relationship, which arises when two companies cooperate in some areas (such as strategic alliances), but simultaneously compete in other areas” (p. 411). Broader coopetition research has characterized coopetition as a paradox involving simultaneous value creation and value appropriation, generating ongoing tensions between sharing and protecting resources, collective and individual interests, and cooperation and competition (Bengtsson & Kock, Reference Bengtsson and Kock2014; Raza-Ullah et al., Reference Raza-Ullah, Bengtsson and Kock2014). Research has examined how organizations manage these tensions through structural arrangements, governance mechanisms, and various forms of separation and integration that allow cooperation and competition to coexist over time (Gnyawali & Charleton, Reference Gnyawali and Charleton2018; Hoffmann et al., Reference Hoffmann, Lavie, Reuer and Shipilov2018). Hoffmann et al. (Reference Hoffmann, Lavie, Reuer and Shipilov2018), for example, argued that organizations cope with coopetition through approaches such as contextual integration and organizational, temporal, or domain separation. They also noted that cooperative and competitive relationships may be explicit or implicit and can be mutually reinforcing as well as constraining. Although this literature has generated important insights into the strategic and structural management of coopetition, researchers have devoted less attention to the communicative processes through which organizational members negotiate these tensions in everyday interaction.
Most scholarship on coopetition has emerged from business-to-business contexts, yet nonprofits face equally strong, and perhaps greater, pressure to balance this duality. Nonprofit organizations often rely on shared missions that emphasize collaboration for social good, while simultaneously vying for scarce philanthropic resources, grants, volunteers, and community recognition (Arenas et al., Reference Arenas, Hai and De Bernardi2021; Irvin, Reference Irvin, Seaman and Young2010). Arenas et al. (Reference Arenas, Hai and De Bernardi2021) investigated clothing resale nonprofits in Catalonia and showed that collaboration and competition were inseparably intertwined—organizations shared knowledge and practices while protecting market share. Paarlberg and Hwang (Reference Paarlberg and Hwang2017), analyzing economic data, similarly found United Way affiliates competing with local nonprofits despite their collective identity as community-oriented organizations. These studies illustrate the structural and resource-driven dimensions of nonprofit coopetition. Less is known about how employees negotiate these tensions in everyday organizational interaction.
There is a normative bias toward collaboration in managing the tension between collaboration and competition. Gazley and Guo (Reference Gazley and Guo2020) cautioned that collaboration is often assumed to be inherently beneficial, despite evidence that it can strain resources or fail to produce desired outcomes. Nonprofit managers may see pressure to collaborate as a burden instead of a potential synergy (Gazley, Reference Gazley2010). Irvin (Reference Irvin, Seaman and Young2010) documented the broad spectrum of both competition (for clients, donors, volunteers, staff, contracts, and media attention) and collaboration (such as sharing information, making mutual referrals, and co-fundraising), noting that foundations often impose collaboration expectations on grantees. These pressures create an external environment where collaboration is valorized, even when competition remains a daily organizational reality.
Several scholars have highlighted how nonprofits attempt to manage this tension. Human service agencies may collaborate in one domain such as providing a particular service while competing in another such as funding (Bunger et al., Reference Bunger, Collins-Camargo, McBeath, Chuang, Pérez-Jolles and Wells2014). Curley et al. (Reference Curley, Daniel, Walk and Harrison2021) argued that leaders experience cognitive dissonance when trying to address collaboration and competition simultaneously. To resolve this tension, nonprofit leaders often downplay or avoid explicit discussions of competition, leaning on collaboration as the socially preferable narrative. Sharp (Reference Sharp2018) similarly found that nonprofits are averse to openly acknowledging competition, as doing so invites existential questions about their organizational identity and purpose. Yet, when forced to confront competition, organizations often reaffirm their social missions with renewed vigor.
Other scholars have emphasized the strategic role of proactive sense giving in the face of competitive and collaborative pressure. Eckerd et al. (Reference Eckerd, Fowles, Daniel and Sandel2023) showed how nonprofits adjust their external messages depending on the competitive environment, emphasizing distinctiveness when competing, but unity when collaboration is expected. This aligns with Barman’s (Reference Barman2002) observation that nonprofits facing competition often differentiate themselves from peers to justify their claim to resources. Recent work has expanded this view by examining how nonprofits use discursive resources such as differentiation and storytelling to craft their intended image and maintain legitimacy (Cajaiba-Santana & Dantas, Reference Cajaiba-Santana and Dantas2025). In all of these cases, communication serves as a way to balance legitimacy, distinctiveness, and stakeholder expectations.
The preceding literature highlights the interplay between collaboration and competition in nonprofit organizations. Much of this research focuses on the economics of coopetition (e.g., Paarlberg & Hwang, Reference Paarlberg and Hwang2017) or the ways that organizations communicate about collaboration to external stakeholders (e.g., Eckerd et al., Reference Eckerd, Fowles, Daniel and Sandel2023). But despite growing interest in coopetition, relatively little research has examined how nonprofit employees discuss and negotiate collaboration and competition in their everyday interactions.
Paradox theory
Paradox theory is an important perspective from which to view this tension. Paradox refers to persistent, interdependent, and contradictory elements that organizations cannot resolve but must manage over time (Smith & Lewis, Reference Smith and Lewis2011). Rather than choosing between competing demands, a paradox perspective emphasizes the need to attend to both simultaneously, sustaining a dynamic equilibrium through ongoing engagement with opposing poles (Smith & Lewis, Reference Smith and Lewis2011). For example, organizations might be expected to innovate rapidly (which involves risk-taking and experimentation) and also maintain reliability for customers (which could involve stability and safety). An organization might need to emphasize how it is distinct from its competitors while still fitting within industry standards. In nonprofit settings, collaboration and competition represent a similar paradox: employees must “stand out” to attract resources while “working together” to achieve social goals—a tension that is both performing (competing objectives) and belonging (identity alignment) in nature (Smith & Lewis, Reference Smith and Lewis2011). As organizations manage paradoxes, they might respond with acceptance and resignation, temporarily emphasizing one element while holding the other in reserve, or actively seeking practices that allow both poles simultaneously (Lewis, Reference Lewis2000). These responses often involve a combination of differentiation and integration practices, in which organizations separate competing demands while also maintaining their interconnections over time (Dragsdahl Lauritzen & Karafyllia, Reference Dragsdahl Lauritzen and Karafyllia2019; Smith & Lewis, Reference Smith and Lewis2011). In nonprofit service systems, such differentiation may take place across domains of activity, as organizations collaborate in some areas while competing in others (Bunger et al., Reference Bunger, Collins-Camargo, McBeath, Chuang, Pérez-Jolles and Wells2014). This pattern suggests that tensions are managed not by eliminating one pole, but by structuring when and where collaboration and competition occur. In addition, paradoxes rarely develop in isolation. They are often interwoven across multiple levels of organizing, including goals (performing), identity (belonging), and relationships among actors (organizing) (Jarzabkowski et al., Reference Jarzabkowski, Le and Van de Ven2013). These persistent tensions make paradox theory especially useful for understanding how nonprofit employees communicatively navigate collaboration and competition.
Importantly, structural and communicative approaches to paradox are not distinct but mutually constitutive. Organizational structures and interorganizational relationships shape how tensions are experienced, while communication simultaneously reproduces, routinizes, and adapts those structures over time (Jarzabkowski et al., Reference Jarzabkowski, Le and Van de Ven2013; Lewis, Reference Lewis2000). Although paradox theory has often examined structural arrangements and managerial strategies, recent scholarship emphasizes that paradoxes are also communicative accomplishments that unfold in everyday interactions. Putnam et al. (Reference Putnam, Fairhurst and Banghart2016) argued that organizational paradoxes are enacted and managed through the talk, texts, and interactions that make contradictory demands visible and actionable. Said another way, paradoxes are situated performances in which organizational actors live the tension through speech and action shaped by multiple audiences, institutional scripts, and moral expectations (la Cour et al., Reference la Cour, Hustinx and Eliasoph2023). Vásquez et al. (Reference Vásquez, Routhier and Brindamour2023) demonstrated how volunteers confronted a market/mission paradox—the need to be both efficient and spontaneous, professional and playful—by collectively talking through contradictions and using discourse to balance competing logics. Their analysis illustrated that paradoxes are sustained and negotiated through communication rather than resolved cognitively or structurally. Likewise, Hedegaard (Reference Hedegaard2023) highlighted the professional/volunteer paradox at a large music festival and found that contradictions can be complex and interwoven. Recent research further suggests that organizations rely on both shared interpretive frames and structural “guardrails” to sustain paradoxes, using boundaries and norms to contain tensions while allowing opposing demands to coexist (Smith & Besharov, Reference Smith and Besharov2019). Across these studies, paradoxes are experienced and interpreted through the ongoing talk, narratives, and sensemaking practices that allow people to navigate competing demands without eliminating them. This perspective highlights how communicative practices both reflect and constitute broader patterns of differentiation and integration, linking micro-level interaction to macro-level organizational dynamics. This communicative view positions everyday organizational discourse as a key site for understanding how paradoxes are lived, managed, and reproduced.
Organizational meetings provide a particularly useful setting for examining how nonprofit employees manage the paradoxical tension between collaboration and competition. Meetings are a central feature of organizational life, consuming significant time and energy for members (Scott et al., Reference Scott, Shanock and Rogelberg2012; Tracy & Dimock, Reference Tracy, Dimock and Kalbfleisch2004). Meetings are sites where organizational policies and practices are communicatively shaped (Lehmann-Willenbrock et al., Reference Lehmann-Willenbrock, Allen and Kauffeld2013). Because they are inherently social, meetings provide a window into the emergent processes that constitute organizational life (Meinecke & Lehmann-Willenbrock, Reference Meinecke, Lehmann-Willenbrock, Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock and Rogelberg2015), including how employees surface, downplay, or reframe the tensions between collaboration and competition. Despite the importance of meetings as a central site of nonprofit organizing, the meeting itself remains underexplored in nonprofit studies and scholars have called for greater attention to how coopetition is enacted through interactions (Bengtsson & Kock, Reference Bengtsson and Kock2014). This study helps fill that gap by examining how meeting talk constitutes and manages the coopetition paradox.
RQ: How do nonprofit organization employees communicatively manage the tension between collaborating and competing in organizational meetings?
Methods
As part of a broader study (Garner, Reference Garner2022), I collaborated with the fundraising department of a mid-sized nonprofit organization in the Southwest United States to examine communication in organizational meetings. Riverbend Alliance (a pseudonym) offers community support through educational programs, healthcare assistance, and a range of additional services. I provided the department’s administrative assistant with audio recorders to document their regular meetings, which typically took place every other week. The only restriction was that the meetings could only be recorded if all attendees had signed the IRB-approved informed consent form. Participants could pause the recording or erase discussions that they felt were too private, but they never exercised that option. The vice president of fundraising typically led these meetings, which included between four and 17 employees. Over the course of 2 years, this process generated 82 hours of audio data drawn from 102 recorded meetings. Because meetings involve real-time interaction among organizational members, they provide a setting in which communicative practices can be observed as they unfold, including how participants respond to tensions in situ.
The present study is best understood as theory-building (Eisenhardt, Reference Eisenhardt1989), using a single case to generate insight into how paradoxes are communicatively enacted in practice. Riverbend Alliance operates in an environment where collaboration and competition are both organizationally consequential, creating opportunities for these tensions to become visible in meeting interactions. Moreover, the fundraising department routinely engaged both collaborative partnerships and competition for philanthropic resources, creating opportunities to observe how employees discussed these tensions in their everyday work. The longitudinal meeting corpus allowed recurring communicative practices to be examined across multiple organizational situations rather than isolated episodes. The value of the case lies not in its representativeness but in its ability to illuminate communicative processes that are difficult to observe using interviews or cross-sectional data.
As I reviewed these data, I noted conversations where employees lamented other nonprofit organizations’ fundraising success. In some cases, these statements were in the context of discussing connections with some of those same organizations, where both/all organizations collaborated together to solve community problems. The juxtaposition of competing for fundraising dollars while simultaneously partnering services to address societal ills was striking, so I sifted the data, looking for any conversations that described a connection between Riverbend Alliance and other nonprofit organizations. There were 17 such conversations. These instances represent the complete set of interactions in the dataset where collaboration and competition were explicit, rather than a selectively sampled subset. This does not imply that the tension was absent from other meetings. Rather, these conversations represent the moments in which participants explicitly articulated the collaboration-competition tension, making it available for analysis. I unitized those conversations by topic, with each one starting when the group shifted to discussing a matter involving connections to another nonprofit organization and ending when they transitioned to a different subject. Finally, I used software to transcribe those conversational moments, yielding 170 single-spaced pages.
I then used a constant comparative analysis to study these conversations (Charmaz, Reference Charmaz2014), focusing not only on the content of what participants said, but on how their talk functioned as a set of communicative practices through which participants negotiated collaboration and competition. For the purposes of this analysis, a communicative practice referred to a recurring way participants used talk to do something in the meeting, such as justify competition, align with peer organizations, or set limits on acceptable collaboration and competition. I proceeded line by line through the data, trying to capture how participants framed collaboration and competition in vivo codes. For example, several department members described a fundraising conference, expressing admiration for other organizations’ fundraising. My open code for that conversation was “NPO conference—what can we learn from each other.” In another meeting, participants discussed local organizations’ fundraisers, which I coded as “Awesome event—we need something like that.” Next, I engaged in focused coding to identify connections between segments of data. Throughout this process, I tacked back and forth between the codes, individual statements by participants, and the larger conversational context within the meetings. I continued until I had coded all of the data in this way. For example, I grouped the codes focused on admiring other organizations’ fundraising efforts together, eventually labeling that code “admiration and replication.” Finally, I identified the recurring communicative practices underlying each theme through which participants negotiated the tension between collaboration and competition. This approach allowed the analysis to move beyond what participants said to examine how their talk accomplished specific interactional functions, such as legitimating competition, aligning with peer organizations, or establishing boundaries. Following Creswell & Poth’s (Reference Creswell and Poth2018) recommendations for validating qualitative findings, I employed multiple strategies to enhance trustworthiness including prolonged engagement with the organization. I also debriefed my interpretations with others in the nonprofit sphere, reflecting on this tension. Finally, rich, thick descriptions were used to situate findings within the organizational context.
Results
Three themes emerged from these data, cutting across both collaboration and competition. Rather than functioning solely as descriptive categories, these themes represent recurring communicative practices through which employees managed the collaboration-competition paradox. The analysis focused not simply on what participants discussed but on what their talk accomplished in the meeting. The first theme, Benefiting the Community, reflects a communicative practice of moral reframing, in which employees positioned both collaboration and competition as serving community outcomes. This theme included conversations about how partnerships provided an advantage to the community over single-organization efforts, but also how this particular organization was better equipped to serve the community than other organizations. The second theme, Admiration and Replication, shows how employees competitively aligned Riverbend with peer organizations by admiring others’ successes while selectively adapting their practices. Finally, the theme of Coopetition Boundary Conditions captures how employees established interactional boundaries that defined when, where, and with whom collaboration and competition were appropriate. These themes illustrate how participants used talk to differentiate and integrate competing demands, making the paradox of collaboration and competition manageable in practice. The following sections describe each theme in more detail.
Benefiting the community
The first theme centered on community needs and emphasized how collaboration but also competition benefited the community. This theme included any conversation about collaboration or competition if that discussion was framed in terms of benefiting the community. Collaboration was often described in this way. Riverbend Alliance had developed a literacy kit as part of one of their programs. As the fundraising department discussed promoting this idea to donors, they talked about how other organizations might want to adopt it. One person said, “mainly it’ll be [a local organization] and probably Boys and Girls Club…Really any other agency like YMCA.” They provided health services for seniors and talked about partnering with Meals on Wheels, Alzheimer’s Association, and the state’s Health and Human Services department as part of that program. After discussing partnerships, the vice-president of fundraising stated, “there’s a lot of information that we have right at our fingertips that we can utilize…so that there’s a direct tie back to [Riverbend Alliance]. The vice president encouraged collaborations so long as Riverbend’s name was connected to the partnership. Through this talk, employees enacted collaboration as a morally legitimate activity by framing resource sharing as a responsibility to the community, thereby positioning partnership as both expected and strategically valuable.
At the same time, Riverbend also demonstrated a keen awareness of the competitive nature of fundraising. During one meeting, employees wanted to discuss the fundraising environment, and they started that conversation by addressing other organizations’ efforts:
We’ve got all these American Heart Association this and March of Dimes that. And there’s all this competition. You’ve got Blue Zones going in, and you know, there’s just always something…So we thought we should talk about it. Just on what types of things we’re seeing out there, and what we should do to not get pushed out or to the side.
They concluded that being a resource to donors by listening to the causes that they cared about and tailoring giving opportunities to those causes could set them apart, “If I come into a company, I’m going to be a resource and an asset to them as best I can. Whereas I don’t know if [other organizations] can initially say that.” During a different meeting, the COO visited the fundraising department and tried to inspire their efforts. They noted, “We own this [fundraising] space… We used to own it even more, right? We aren’t the only game in town anymore, so now we’ve got to compete, and we’ve got to win. We gotta win.” After hearing fundraising ideas from employees, the COO circled back to the competition, “Can we own this space again? We can…We’re gonna kick their ass.” This escalation into explicitly competitive language momentarily violated the normative expectation of collaboration within the nonprofit sector. This disruption was repaired through subsequent talk in which the COO and employees reframed competition as necessary for serving clients rather than advancing organizational self-interest. Through this unfolding sequence from competitive intensification to moral justification, competitive talk became legitimate and actionable, allowing employees to embrace competition without threatening their identity as a mission-driven organization. This exchange illustrates how paradox is not simply managed at the level of abstract framing but is accomplished moment-by-moment through interactional sequences that introduce, challenge, and restore organizational norms.
This moral reframing became more explicit in subsequent discussion. After inspiring employees to be competitive, the COO went on to say.
It’s not about [Riverbend Alliance]. It’s about the clients we serve, those in need who get resources through us. We have to win for them, right? It’s not about the brand, it’s not about all that stuff. We carry that, and we carry proudly, but that’s a means to the end. The end is them.
In a different meeting where this department discussed competitive fundraising, someone asked reflectively, “What’s the ultimate goal? What’s the goal for [Riverbend Alliance]? If we’re nailing this, what happens?” An employee responded, “We put ourselves out of business.” These comments reveal how employees managed the tension between collaboration and competition by transforming competition into a moral obligation, reframing competitive success as necessary for community impact rather than organizational gain. Through this talk, they converted a potentially divisive paradox into a shared sense of purpose.
One event highlighted the ways in which collaboration and competition entangled each other under the umbrella of helping people in need. Late in data collection, a natural disaster affected the area. Riverbend Alliance helped to facilitate resources for approximately 200 people that were temporarily displaced by the disaster. The fundraising department wanted to include support for disaster recovery in their fundraising appeals. The plan that they developed was:
We have got two different streams, and if you want to give to triage immediate relief, we’re directing you to United Way, and we have that link that we’ve provided. If you would like to give to the long-term, sustainable growth and help for folks who are going to remain here after the fact, then [Riverbend’s fundraising link] is good for that.
However, in a meeting two weeks later, they lamented including United Way in their messaging because “that message established quick enough. So now we’re going and saying, ‘no keep it here because we’re going to help long term.’…I think we could have messaged that in the beginning very differently.” They explicitly highlighted their partnerships with the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and the local Food Bank as an advantage over donating to just one of those organizations because collaborations could promise more comprehensive and sustainable relief. One employee noted that “plugging [refugees] into schools, jobs, and the local economy will involve a team effort among [many organizations], and not just the Red Cross.” Another employee pointed out that fundraisers could emphasize that contributions to the Red Cross might or might not be designated for the local disaster recovery. These conversations demonstrated that fundraising employees balanced the need to collaborate to meet community needs but also separate themselves from other nonprofit organizations in the eyes of donors because Riverbend Alliance could meet community needs better than other nonprofit organizations. Through these discussions, employees accomplished coopetition communicatively, aligning collaboration and competition under a shared narrative of community service. This highlights how coopetition is not static but interactionally adjusted through ongoing sensemaking.
Admiration and replication
A second theme focused on the ways in which fundraising employees admired the efforts of other organizations to raise money, and in some cases, the ways in which these employees discussed trying to replicate those efforts. Some of these included conversations in the context of local competitors, and others focused on organizations where there was not a feeling of competition, either because the organizations served different populations or different geographical areas. For example, one meeting included a report from two employees who toured the facility of a smaller nonprofit in the context of hosting a joint event to collect soap and shampoo for community residents. One of the employees described their “comprehensive approach” to helping people fleeing domestic violence: “You run out of your house with the clothes on your back and whatever your kids have, and you don’t have diapers, you don’t have dish soap.” Later, they reflected, “One thing I found so thoughtful about how they approach it. They, unlike some food pantries where you go up and get a box of food, they allow you to pick your food…they’re just really trying to help maintain that person’s dignity.” In a different meeting, several employees shared things that they had learned from other nonprofit organizations at a fundraising conference. These expressions of admiration were more than recognizing a peer organization’s success. They functioned as a form of legitimating alignment, allowing employees to position themselves within a shared nonprofit field and establish common ground from which later comparisons and differentiation became acceptable.
Admiration did not end with appreciation, however. In many conversations, it became the starting point for competitive comparison. In trying to recruit corporate donors, one person noted:
I’ve talked with companies, the thing they really liked about American Heart is that it’s kind of an active opportunity for their employees to get involved because they have the walk…I wanted to get you guys’ thoughts on what you think the differentiation is that we can bring, not in a slight to American Heart, but in a way to put our best foot forward.
This exchange illustrates that admiration did more than express respect for another nonprofit. It established American Heart as a legitimate point of comparison, making competitive differentiation acceptable rather than antagonistic. Employees first established American Heart as a legitimate benchmark before asking how Riverbend could distinguish itself. The qualifier “not in a slight” was especially important because it explicitly rejected disparaging a peer organization even as employees searched for a competitive advantage. In this way, admiration functioned as a communicative bridge to competition. Rather than replacing competition, it made competitive positioning compatible with the collaborative norms of the nonprofit sector.
The same communicative pattern appeared elsewhere. Someone noted that other nonprofit organizations host walking events, to which another employee responded by suggesting a “Lunch and Learn or training to prepare you for your March of Dimes walk or your Alzheimer’s walk.” In a different meeting, an employee stated, “What we’re competing with on the fundraising trail is Heart Association, March of Dimes, Alzheimer’s, and they’re doing activities or an event and we come in with, not that but great stories and great work. But we are up against that.” The employees discussed the idea of a giving day, but someone else pointed out, “then you’ve got more competition with, Community Foundation does the same thing, right? The giving date, giving week, they’re doing that same concept of a kickoff, of a finite experience event.” In each case, employees did not dismiss competing organizations. Instead, they used competitors’ fundraising strategies as reference points for evaluating Riverbend’s own position. Comparison therefore became a way of identifying opportunities for differentiation without rejecting the legitimacy of peer organizations.
Across these conversations, admiration and replication operated as a recurring interactional sequence. Employees first affirmed the legitimacy of peer organizations, then treated those organizations as sources of comparison, and finally translated comparison into selective adaptation rather than imitation. By adapting rather than copying others’ ideas, employees preserved both their identity as members of a collaborative nonprofit community and their distinctiveness as competitors for donors.
Coopetition boundary conditions
A final theme that emerged from participants’ conversations in these meetings was boundary conditions on either collaboration or competition. This theme captures communicative boundary work through which employees defined the limits of acceptable collaboration and competition, specifying when, where, and with whom each was appropriate. During one meeting, these employees were discussing competition with a nonprofit organization in a neighboring county. These two organizations had collaboratively agreed to solicit donations in their own counties, using a geographic boundary to prevent competition. These employees noted that their counterparts did not always respect that agreement, “You’ve gotta watch [them].” Someone else reflected on the potential for competition despite the geographical agreement, “They’re overstepping in a lot of ways. And they have been, but I think because no one stopped them before.” This person noted the need to be both assertive and collaborative in approaching potential donors, “So it’s like, we have the same goal: raise money. We’re going to raise money. So all that to say, just be careful. Be aware. And don’t be uncomfortable about going to the [county line donors]. Hug that county line.” This exchange began with an invocation of a geographic boundary that distinguished appropriate collaboration from competition. However, as the discussion unfolded, employees reinterpreted this boundary by emphasizing the behavior of partner organizations, suggesting that collaboration norms may not be reciprocated. Through this shift, competitive action was justified not as a violation of the boundary but as a response to others’ behavior. The boundary was not fixed but negotiable, allowing employees to recalibrate the balance between collaboration and competition while maintaining a sense of legitimacy.
In another meeting, an employee expressed the tension between solving community problems together and competing for fundraising dollars by limiting the amount of competitive spirit that employees should openly exhibit. They said,“ I do not think we want to fully put on a competitor’s hat, because American Heart is doing great things, but I think we should also be prepared to discuss our strengths and the things we bring to the table, the value we can add in comparison to American Heart and maybe some of these other organizations.” This comment explicated an important boundary: be competitive, but do not seem too competitive. Employees regulated the visibility of competition, distinguishing between engaging in competitive behavior and appearing overtly competitive, thereby maintaining legitimacy while pursuing organizational advantage.
Finally, these fundraisers discussed three tiers of giving. As previously described, they preferred donors who gave to Riverbend Alliance. However, as an alternative, they encouraged donors to give to organizations with whom they partnered. For example, “you can give directly to Children’s Health [with whom Riverbend was collaborating] and help us distribute asthma medicine and nebulizers.” The least desirable outcome was for a potential donor to give funds to an organization with whom Riverbend had no connection as one employee derisively summarized, “I don’t want to invite them to write a check to their church.” Thus, another boundary on collaboration and competition was that it was better to compete with non-collaborators.
These boundary conditions highlighted the delicate nature of coopetition among nonprofit organizations. Through these discussions, employees established interactional guardrails that preserved both collaboration and competition by defining acceptable forms of each, preventing drift toward either extreme while maintaining organizational legitimacy.
Discussion
This study used data from meetings in a nonprofit organization to understand how organizational members communicated about collaboration and competition with other organizations. Results indicated that participants framed both collaboration and competition in terms of benefiting the community. Both collaboration and competition involved admiration of other organizations’ success and attempts to replicate that success. Finally, participants described the boundaries on collaboration and competition. The following paragraphs discuss these findings in the terms of the specific tension between collaboration and competition as well as the more general theoretical contributions to paradox theory.
Collaboration and competition
That participants framed competition as well as collaboration in terms of community benefit is noteworthy. Previous research highlighted the ways in which collaboration benefited communities as nonprofit organizations might share information, minimizing costs by sharing personnel, engage in mutual fundraising, and even share space (Irvin, Reference Irvin, Seaman and Young2010). By working together, organizations can generate outcomes beyond what they could achieve independently (Kettl, Reference Kettl2006). Some scholars have described the economic benefits of competition (e.g., Harrison & Thornton, Reference Harrison and Thornton2022) as market pressures may eliminate duplicative nonprofit organizations and ensure that only the most effective survive. However, it is unusual for nonprofit employees to directly discuss competition (Curley et al., Reference Curley, Daniel, Walk and Harrison2021; Sharp, Reference Sharp2018). Arenas et al. (Reference Arenas, Hai and De Bernardi2021) showed that collaboration and competition co-occur. The present study complements this structural insight by illustrating how employees communicatively construct that co-occurrence in real time, framing both collaboration and competition as serving community goals within the same conversational sequences. In doing so, this study shifts attention from where coopetition occurs to how it is communicatively accomplished, demonstrating that co-occurrence is not simply a structural condition but an interactional achievement produced through everyday talk. Practically, this has implications for how nonprofits preserve legitimacy while engaging in necessary competitive talk. It also complicates the normative bias toward collaboration in the sector—showing that competition, when framed carefully, can be seen as socially valuable. From a paradox perspective, this communicative practice primarily addressed the intersection of performing and belonging tensions (Smith & Lewis, Reference Smith and Lewis2011). Employees aligned competitive fundraising (performing) with Riverbend’s mission identity (belonging), making competition compatible with who they understood themselves to be as a nonprofit organization.
Boundary setting on collaboration and competition is also a novel contribution from these results. These participants set limits on when, with whom, and to what extent they would collaborate or compete, illustrating tacit rules and relational negotiations beyond the structural pressures to collaborate and compete. Previous research indicated that nonprofit employees prefer to avoid direct conversations about competition (Curley et al., Reference Curley, Daniel, Walk and Harrison2021; Sharp, Reference Sharp2018), and other scholars have likewise acknowledged that some nonprofit managers may prefer to avoid collaborating (Gazley, Reference Gazley2010). These participants explicitly described limiting how competitive they seemed to outside stakeholders. They also recognized that collaboration needed to be limited as well in terms of geography and in terms of mutual fundraising. Thus, boundary conditions emerged as a theoretical contribution as employees’ talk enacted limits that preserved both collaboration and distinctiveness. These boundary practices align with prior research identifying differentiation as a key strategy for managing paradox. Bunger et al. (Reference Bunger, Collins-Camargo, McBeath, Chuang, Pérez-Jolles and Wells2014) found that nonprofit organizations often collaborate in some domains while competing in others, effectively structuring when and where each activity occurs. The present findings extend this work by showing how such differentiation is not only structurally arranged but communicatively enacted through everyday talk. Employees defined who counted as collaborators versus competitors, when competition was appropriate, and how it should be expressed, thereby constructing the domains in which collaboration and competition unfolded. In this sense, these communicative boundaries function as guardrails (Smith & Besharov, Reference Smith and Besharov2019), providing interactional limits that preserve both poles of the paradox while preventing drift toward purely competitive or purely collaborative orientations. This finding extends guardrails in paradox theory by showing that such constraints are not only formal structures but are also enacted and negotiated through everyday interaction. Scholars would do well to further explore the boundary conditions of coopetition. For practitioners, these findings suggest that boundary management depends not only on organizational policy but also on how collaboration and competition are framed in everyday interaction. These communicative boundaries also reflect organizing tensions (Jarzabkowski et al., Reference Jarzabkowski, Le and Van de Ven2013). By defining who counted as collaborators, when competition became appropriate, and how competitive talk could be expressed, employees organized relationships while simultaneously reinforcing Riverbend’s collaborative identity.
Finally, admiration and replication reflected a more subtle form of paradox management. Fundraising employees routinely expressed respect for other organizations, sometimes celebrating their innovative events or community visibility as they simultaneously discussed how to adapt those practices in ways that preserved Riverbend’s distinctiveness. Through this talk, employees communicatively aligned with peers through admiration yet differentiated themselves through replication with modification. Such conversations served as a mechanism for maintaining both legitimacy and distinctiveness, core identity concerns in the nonprofit sector (Barman, Reference Barman2002; Cajaiba-Santana & Dantas, Reference Cajaiba-Santana and Dantas2025). By emphasizing how Riverbend could adapt similar initiatives while preserving its own identity, employees reasserted the organization’s unique contribution. These conversations illustrate integration alongside differentiation as employees simultaneously aligned with peer organizations through admiration while maintaining distinctiveness through selective adaptation, illustrating how both poles of the paradox are sustained together rather than separated entirely (Dragsdahl Lauritzen & Karafyllia, Reference Dragsdahl Lauritzen and Karafyllia2019; Smith & Lewis, Reference Smith and Lewis2011). This mechanism also illustrates the overlap of belonging and performing tensions (Smith & Lewis, Reference Smith and Lewis2011). By affirming the legitimacy of peer nonprofits before differentiating Riverbend’s own fundraising efforts, employees simultaneously enacted membership in a shared nonprofit community while pursuing competitive success.
The present findings also extend broader coopetition scholarship. Previous research has emphasized how organizations manage the simultaneous demands of cooperation and competition through structural mechanisms (Bengtsson & Kock, Reference Bengtsson and Kock2014; Hoffmann et al., Reference Hoffmann, Lavie, Reuer and Shipilov2018; Raza-Ullah et al., Reference Raza-Ullah, Bengtsson and Kock2014). The present study complements this work by showing how those broader arrangements are communicatively accomplished in everyday organizational meetings. Employees did not simply operate within structural forms of coopetition; through moral reframing, admiration and replication, and boundary work, they continually interpreted, negotiated, and reproduced the balance between collaboration and competition in interaction.
Paradox theory
The present study contributes to paradox theory by showing that employees managed collaboration and competition through recurring communicative practices rather than isolated conversational choices. Across meetings, moral reframing, admiration and replication, and boundary work functioned as complementary defensive responses to paradox (Lewis, Reference Lewis2000). Instead of being independent responses, these mechanisms addressed distinct yet interrelated challenges posed by the collaboration-competition paradox. Moral reframing justified competition in relation to Riverbend’s mission. Admiration and replication preserved legitimacy within the broader nonprofit community while maintaining competitive distinctiveness. Boundary work defined the conditions under which collaboration and competition could coexist. Together, these practices rendered the paradox manageable without resolving its underlying tensions. They also show that employees managed multiple paradox dimensions simultaneously rather than addressing collaboration and competition as a single tension. Moral reframing and admiration primarily addressed intertwined performing and belonging tensions by aligning competitive fundraising with Riverbend’s mission and identity, whereas boundary work centered on the intersection of organizing and belonging tensions by defining appropriate relationships and contexts for collaboration and competition while reinforcing Riverbend’s identity as a collaborative nonprofit (Jarzabkowski et al., Reference Jarzabkowski, Le and Van de Ven2013; Smith & Lewis, Reference Smith and Lewis2011). Taken together, these communicative practices illustrate how differentiation and integration were accomplished through everyday interactions rather than solely through organizational structures. More importantly, they suggest that these broader paradox dynamics became visible only because employees continually enacted them through communication.
Rather than merely reflecting the collaboration-competition paradox, employees’ communication constituted one of the primary means through which it was maintained in everyday organizational life. As illustrated in moments where explicitly competitive language disrupted collaborative norms and was subsequently repaired through moral reframing, paradox was not continuously stable but was actively challenged and restored through interactional sequences. In line with la Cour et al. (Reference la Cour, Hustinx and Eliasoph2023), paradoxes functioned as situated performances through which participants enacted legitimacy and organizational identity. By framing competition as community service, comparing Riverbend with respected peer organizations, and defining the limits of collaboration, employees enacted a morally legitimate organizational identity while preserving relationships within the broader nonprofit community. These findings suggest that moral legitimation functions primarily as a communicative framing mechanism rather than a distinct paradox strategy. Employees did not eliminate the tension between collaboration and competition. Instead, they repeatedly framed competitive action as a means of fulfilling Riverbend’s mission, rendering competition compatible with the organization’s identity and values. This emphasis on moral justification may be particularly important in nonprofit organizations because legitimacy depends not only on organizational performance but also on demonstrating fidelity to a social mission (Barman, Reference Barman2002; Gazley & Guo, Reference Gazley and Guo2020). These observations suggest that paradox strategies are enacted differently across organizational contexts because actors draw on context-specific communicative resources to render competing demands legitimate. In nonprofits, moral framing appears to be one such resource. In contrast to Vásquez et al. (Reference Vásquez, Routhier and Brindamour2023), whose volunteers explicitly discussed paradoxes, participants in this study managed tensions implicitly, avoiding direct acknowledgment of contradiction. This contrast extends communicative paradox research by demonstrating that paradoxes may be sustained and routinized not only through overt dialogue but also through subtle, taken-for-granted conversational practices that reproduce coopetition as normal organizational life. These findings reinforce and extend the view that structural and communicative dimensions of paradox are mutually constitutive, demonstrating that interaction is a primary mechanism through which paradoxical structures are reproduced and adapted in practice.
Finally, a key contribution of this study lies in its focus on organizational meetings as a setting where communicative mechanisms can be observed as they unfold. Prior research on paradox has often relied on structural analyses or retrospective accounts, whereas meetings provide access to interaction in real time. This allows observation not only of how participants describe tensions, but how those tensions are introduced, negotiated, and repaired in situ. Across multiple meetings, moral reframing, admiration and replication, and boundary work appeared as recurring communicative practices through which employees rendered the collaboration-competition paradox workable without resolving it. Meetings therefore offer a valuable setting for understanding not only how paradox is expressed but also how it is routinely managed in everyday organizational life.
Limitations, future directions, and conclusion
Obviously, these conclusions should be interpreted within the context of the limitations of this study. This was a small set of conversations in a single nonprofit organization, and I did not follow up to ask how employees felt about explicitly discussing collaboration or competition. Accordingly, the findings are not intended to be statistically generalizable across all nonprofit organizations. Instead, they offer analytic generalization (Yin, Reference Yin2018), contributing to theory by identifying communicative mechanisms through which paradoxes may be enacted in similar organizational contexts. Future research might examine the ways in which employees across a wide range of nonprofit organizations talk about collaboration and competition, exploring the communicative strategies that employees enact to maintain a balance between those phenomena. Because the analysis focused on explicit discussions of collaboration and competition, it may not capture more subtle or implicit ways that the tension shaped everyday work. Consistent with a thematic analytic approach, this study emphasized recurring communicative patterns across conversations rather than the fine-grained sequential organization of interaction. Future work using conversation analytic or other interaction-focused approaches could complement these findings by examining how these communicative mechanisms emerge moment by moment in meetings. Finally, future scholarship should continue to highlight the ways in which organizing occurs in meetings.
This study examined how nonprofit employees communicatively managed the paradox of collaboration and competition in their everyday meetings. Through talk, employees enacted both cooperation and rivalry, reframing competition as community service, admiring and emulating peer organizations, and setting boundaries around acceptable competition. These patterns reflected primarily defensive paradox management strategies (Lewis, Reference Lewis2000), which preserved organizational legitimacy and stability but constrained opportunities for mutual learning and deeper collaboration. By examining how employees talked through these tensions in meetings, this study shows that paradoxes are enacted rather than simply acknowledged and extends paradox theory into the communicative domain of meetings. Paradoxes are not merely conditions that organizations face but interactional accomplishments that employees produce and hold in balance through routine conversation in meetings. Meetings, thus, emerge as a critical site for observing how organizational members construct, negotiate, and sustain competing demands in real time. Practically, the findings underscore the importance of creating conversational spaces where employees can safely discuss tensions between collaboration and competition, allowing nonprofits to move beyond defensive talk toward more integrative, learning-oriented approaches. Understanding how nonprofits talk their way through paradoxes offers new insight into how they sustain mission, identity, and community impact amid ongoing pressures to both cooperate and compete.
Funding statement
This research was supported by a Dean’s Research Grant from the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University.
Competing interests
The author has no conflict of interest in the results of this study.
Open access
