Organizational effectiveness: the key to accountability for collegiate schools of nursing

This study describes the organizational effectiveness of collegiate nursing programs in terms of their ability to interact with their external environment. Nursing education administrators from 401 institutions were surveyed concerning their ability to secure resources and the degree of their system's openness and community interaction. Overall, with a response rate of 76.8 per cent, the administrators considered the availability of resources to be adequate and perceived their programs to be moderately successful in procuring resources. A categorical comparison of responses indicated that administrators in specialized/professional institutions identified a greater degree of richness in the availability of resources and perceived their programs to be more successful in procuring resources. However, a second categorical comparison found no statistically significant differences among administrators in their perception of system openness and community interaction. All administrators considered their environments cooperative, accepting, predictable, and stable.