While volunteering is an essential factor in service delivery in many societal areas, the inclusion of volunteers in formal settings can also lead to tensions. In this article, we combine the literature on volunteering and inter-professional collaboration (IPC) to elaborate a framework regarding remedies for tensions between professional staff and volunteers within IPC in health care provision to ensure successful collaboration. Using a dyadic survey design to interview volunteers and volunteer managers, we show that the perspectives of volunteers and volunteer managers on the antecedents of effective IPC differ in paradoxical ways. While volunteer managers apply organizational logic concerning tasks and processes to avoid tensions, volunteers seek solutions on a relational basis. However, rather than trying to resolve these paradoxes, our study indicates that carefully managing tensions arising between volunteers and professional staff may be more successful than trying to resolve all tensions.

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) seek to influence corporate responsibility practices by pursuing either collaborative or confrontational approaches toward companies. In doing so, they frequently attempt to influence households' perceptions of companies and, by extension, their consumption decisions. To what extent NPOs adopting varying approaches toward companies are successful in affecting households' perceptions and decisions, however, remains underexamined. Furthermore, how NPOs' choice of approach impacts households' perception of and donation behavior toward NPOs remains a largely open question. In this contribution, we investigate these issues by means of an experimental approach. The results of our study indicate that both confrontational and collaborative approaches by NPOs exert a significant effect on households' perceptions of companies and their consumption intentions. Somewhat paradoxically, while confrontational approaches exert stronger effects on households' perceptions of companies and their consumption behavior, collaborative approaches are viewed as more legitimate by households, thus garnering more support in the form of donations.