Volunteer job design: A fit perspective

Abstract

Volunteers are a resource for nonprofit organizations, many of whom would not be able to function effectively without their assistance. Therefore, understanding why people volunteer and how organizations utilize their talents is an important area of study, including examining how organizations can best design volunteer jobs to meet the mutual needs of the organization and the individual volunteer. This paper adopts a Person-Environment (P-E) fit perspective to offer an integrated model of volunteer job design that systematically incorporates perspectives Hackman and Oldham's Job Characteristics Model, Grant's relational job design, Rosso and colleagues' identity perspectives, and Wrzesniewski and Dutton's job crafting theory. We propose a theoretically grounded model that explains the flow between volunteers' needs and their culmination into favorable volunteers' attitudes and behaviors for nonprofit organizations. The paper also offers propositions for researchers to empirically test the model.