Volunteer motivation: A field study examining why some do more, while others do less

Abstract

In nonprofit organizations, motivating volunteers for particular activities is challenging because they can take place in unstructured environments. Therefore, members are disengaged despite their initial commitment to the cause. An important opportunity in the literature is to examine motivation from the perspective of the volunteer; and, more specifically, to test for the differential impact that self‐efficacy, collective efficacy, and perceived organizational support have on three motivational outcomes: effort, performance, and satisfaction. Our focus is on volunteer motivation to support a specific event or project. Teasing out the impact of one's efficacious beliefs about their group at the individual level is an important contribution that has yet to be examined. Using data from 285 volunteers, results indicate that collective efficacy and perceived organizational support positively influence volunteer satisfaction. An important contrast we confirmed, unlike self‐efficacy and perceived organizational support, was collective efficacy's negative relationship to effort, which in turn affected performance. We were able to isolate the unique relationships, corroborating extant research with respect to self‐efficacy and perceived organizational support. As a result, the potential for spurious relationships was ruled out, adding credibility to the new findings.

From Fellowship to Stewardship? Explaining Extra-Role Behavior of Volunteer Firefighters

“…Furthermore, commitment positively relates to firefighters' engagement in extra work. Finally, similar to past research (Cady et al 2018), perceived organizational support has a positive association with extra-role behavior. These results indicate that some aspects of a stewardship-oriented work and organizational context influence individual workers' performance.…”

“…Research on volunteering confirms these assumptions. Accordingly, volunteers who perceive organizational support are more satisfied, more likely to remain in the volunteer organization (Walker et al 2016), and spend more effort in accomplishing tasks (Cady et al 2018). Consequently, we expect organizational support to moderate the relationship between PSM and extra-role behavior and hypothesize the following:…”

“…Unfortunately, little is known about the conditions that promote the extra-role behaviors of volunteers in organizations. Although numerous studies have attempted to identify the personal characteristics of individuals that predict working extra hours (Organ 1988; George and Bettenhausen 1990;Somech and Drach-Zahavy 2000), little research has focused on the extra-role behavior of volunteers (Schaubroeck and Ganster 1991;Millette and Gagné 2008;Shantz et al 2014;Brauchli et al 2017;Cady et al 2018). Consequently, this article examines the factors associated with volunteers' extra-role behavior and questions the conditions under which volunteer firefighters go above and beyond their emergency duties (e.g., responding to 911 calls) and conduct extra work in a sense of prosocial organizational behavior.…”

Intangible Assets and Performance in Nonprofit Organizations:A Systematic Literature Review

“…Three out of nine papers addressed all the dimensions of IC: human, relational and structural/organizational (Mohd Noor et al, 2015;Benevene et al, 2018;Bontis et al, 2018). One out of nine papers only addressed the human dimension (Cady et al, 2018), whereas three papers addressed the relational dimension (Misener and Doherty, 2013;Wemmer et al, 2016;Álvarez-González et al, 2017), and one paper addressed both human and structural/organizational capital (Zhu et al, 2016). Finally, one paper took into account dimensions related to the types of knowledge tackled in the IC framework but reorganized them in the knowledge-centricity construct (Vakharia et al, 2018).…”

“…While four studies used a scale on organizational performance or effectiveness, measuring how it was perceived by the NPOs' members by means of validated or ad hoc Likert scales (Mohd Noor et al, 2015;Wemmer et al, 2016;Zhu et al, 2016;Álvarez-González et al, 2017) or structured interviews (Misener and Doherty, 2013;Benevene et al, 2018), others relied on objective measures of performance. Among the objective measures selected, a number of activities, members, and beneficiaries were used as performance measures in two studies (Álvarez-González et al, 2017;Cady et al, 2018), as well as financial performance (Bontis et al, 2018;Vakharia et al, 2018). Furthermore, one study considered mission-based as well as financial performance (Bontis et al, 2018).…”