A model of employees' responses to corporate “volunteerism”

Abstract

Increasingly, corporate philanthropy includes not only monetary donations, but also employees' service contributions to community projects. Using concepts from role theory, this paper proposes that employees' readiness to volunteer interacts with their perceived link between company-sponsored community service and salient organizational rewards and resources to moderate the impact of their community service participation on their job attitudes and on the community recipients they serve. Specifically, we propose that to the extent that employees have lower readiness to volunteer, their compliance with community service role expectations so as not to forfeit organizational rewards will increase their person-role conflict, which will, in turn, negatively affect their job satisfaction and organizational commitment and their treatment of community recipients; and to the extent that employees have higher readiness to volunteer, they will, regardless of their perceptions of the link between service and organizational rewards, derive from their company-sponsored community service a sense of person-role congruence that will enhance their job satisfaction and organizational commitment and foster their caring and helpfulness toward community recipients.