Hourly Payment and Volunteering: The Effect of Organizational Practices on Decisions About Time Use

Abstract

We examine how organizational practices making an economic evaluation of time salient, such as hourly pay, can lead people to spend less time on uncompensated work—volunteering. Using nationally representative survey data, in Study 1 we showed that, with other factors that might affect time decisions controlled, people paid by the hour were both less likely to volunteer and spent less time volunteering than counterparts who were not paid hourly. Study 2 showed that having people calculate their hourly wage was associated with decreased willingness to volunteer and that this experimental manipulation only affected people not paid by the hour. Because work organizations are typically institutionalized in every sense of that term (Scott, 1995), with their management practices often assuming a taken-for-granted quality (e.g., Zucker, 1977), people can learn decision rules and ways of thinking at work that they may then take with them into other spheres of their lives. Specifically, people may develop a particular psychology of time and come to make different decisions about time use depending on the management practices relevant to the evaluation of time to which they are exposed. Although we believe that management practices and the dimensions of decisions about time that they may affect are many, we begin our inquiry by focusing on the effects of hourly payment on the decision to volunteer time. We argue that being paid by the hour almost inevitably makes salient an economic frame for the evaluation of time. Being compensated on an hourly basis predisposes people to assess how they spend their time in terms of the monetary returns from their decisions (e.g., Evans, Barley, & Kunda, 2004). We further argue that this monetary or economic frame surrounding time use is particularly relevant for decisions about work and work-like activities. In this article, we focus on volunteering, a theoretically important class of work that is freely undertaken without remuneration (Tilly & Tilly, 1994). Because volunteering has been defined as work done without pay, it is logical to argue that to the extent that the practice of hourly payment increases the salience of the economic evaluation of time, people paid by the hour should be less willing to volunteer and should volunteer less of their time than those not paid by the hour. We used a large nationally representative survey with numerous control variables as well as an experiment in which people calculated their hourly wage to illustrate the effect of the framing of compensation on decisions about time use.