How Volunteer Involvement Affects Professionals’ Basic Needs Satisfaction and Intrinsic Motivation

Abstract

As governments around the world seek to increase the capacity of public organizations to deliver high-quality services to its citizenry, volunteers are increasingly seen as a critical resource. While volunteers can bring a number of positive resources to public organizations and help increase cost-efficiency, service quality and impact, research has largely overlooked how professionals respond to volunteer involvement. We contribute to the nascent literature on how volunteers are perceived by individuals with a professional identity by integrate insights from studies on coproduction and volunteering with the established social psychology theory of self-determination to propose how that characteristic of the tasks allocated to volunteers affect professionals’ work motivation through the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for feeling autonomous, competent and related to others. Using structural equation modeling and an instrumental variables estimation approach, our results show that intrinsic motivation is negatively impacted when volunteers solve tasks that are core–in contrast to complementary–to the profession, and the identity of professionals. Moreover, these negative effects are transmitted through the needs for feeling competent and related to others, while results are more mixed for satisfaction of the basic need for feeling autonomous.