A Study of Voluntary Organizational Membership: The Assimilation Process in a Community Choir

Volunteer role mastery and commitment: can HRM make a difference?

“…While role mastery has a long history in HRM research (Feldman, 1981), it has, to our knowledge, seldom been examined in the context of volunteering. This is surprising, given that the two dimensions of role mastery (i.e., role clarity and self-efficacy) arguably play a more salient role in volunteering than in paid employment due to the pervasiveness and persistence of role ambiguity and low confidence and efficacy beliefs among volunteers (Haski-Leventhal & Bargal, 2008;Kramer, 2011;Kramer et al, 2013). In the present study, we show that role mastery promotes volunteers' commitment to the organisation.…”

Severing Primary Ties: Exit From Totalistic Organizations

“…Choir members simply stopped attending and often returned at a later time, suggesting an exit pattern that not only differs from normal types of organizational relationships, but appears related to the costs of leaving. The stakes of exit were lower for volunteers who did not stand to lose income like employees who leave a job (Kramer, 2011), and the process of leaving did not conform to the same stages of contemplation about the decision to exit and postexit sensemaking Jablin (2001) describes. If the exit process is observably different in the low-stakes situations observed by Kramer (2011), presumably higher stakes situations also will result in a unique process of exit.…”

“…This exit research often applies Jablin's (2001) phasic model of information seeking and sharing, which includes stages of preannouncement sharing with peers, announcement, and postexit sensemaking. Kramer (2011) analyzed a community choir, finding that volunteers experience a far more passive process of exit than the phasic model Jablin (2001) advanced for corporate employees. Choir members simply stopped attending and often returned at a later time, suggesting an exit pattern that not only differs from normal types of organizational relationships, but appears related to the costs of leaving.…”

Students' Perceptions of College Classroom Connectedness, Assimilation, and Peer Relationships

“…That is, the students in their study indicated that a socially supportive and cooperative classroom climate is one way to enhance both the extent to which they feel comfortable socializing with their peers and the rate at which they are motivated to perform their best academically. Because one purpose of assimilation is to reduce employees' uncertainty about the organization and to aid members in developing relationships with each other (Gailliard et al, 2010;Kramer, 2011), students who perceive a higher level of classroom connectedness should experience a higher level of acclimation with their instructors and their classmates. Moreover, because the development of peer relationships is among the most important components in helping students adjust to the demands of their classrooms and encouraging intellectual-self confidence (Antonio, 2004), it is plausible that students enrolled in a course with information peers will report lower levels of assimilation than students enrolled in a course with either collegial peers or special peers.…”