A volunteer worker placement model for business

Abstract

Volunteer workers contribute significantly to the enhancement of their communities as travel destinations. The challenge to the strategic managers of tourism activities is to properly match volunteers' needs and their potential for contribution with organizational reward capabilities and task requirements. However, unique difficulties arise in achieving optimal volunteer placements because unpaid workers require opportunities for the satisfaction of personal needs which are discernably different in priority from the satisfactions sought by financially compensated workers. Thus, organizations' existing reward systems must be adaptive to the unique demands of these special work relationships. As an aid in this internal adjustment, a Volunteer Worker Placement Model is presented which is designed to provide tourism businesses with a conceptual and practical technique for understanding and diagnosing the “inducements-contributions” nature of volunteer task assignments.