Organizations becoming flush with cash makes them a target for bad actors and those with personality disorders. This is also a problem for individuals, but small grants or tenure are less likely to cause it (though it will happen to the one doing the granting)
I think the nonprofit world is particularly susceptible to deleterious perverse incentives due to the lack of tight feedback loops you would get with a for-profit business, and indeed one failure mode is the over-accumulation of people with unaligned goals. As mentioned, this is much less of a risk when there is a good feedback signal, which some nonprofits do have, or when the organization is very small.
Organizations becoming flush with cash makes them a target for bad actors and those with personality disorders. This is also a problem for individuals, but small grants or tenure are less likely to cause it (though it will happen to the one doing the granting)
I think the nonprofit world is particularly susceptible to deleterious perverse incentives due to the lack of tight feedback loops you would get with a for-profit business, and indeed one failure mode is the over-accumulation of people with unaligned goals.
As mentioned, this is much less of a risk when there is a good feedback signal, which some nonprofits do have, or when the organization is very small.