Volunteer Commitment Research Articles

Do Donors Value Volunteer Commitment in Assessing Nonprofit Effectiveness?

We examine whether donors value volunteer commitment disclosures reported on the IRS Form 990. Donors and volunteers prefer to make respective gifts of money and time to nonprofits that are effective in furthering their missions. Based on the premise that volunteers, as insiders to an organization, are better positioned than donors to judge the impact of their contributions, we hypothesize that volunteer commitment provides value relevant information to donors. We find that donations are positively associated with the level of volunteer commitment and that other (noisy) effectiveness disclosures – namely the program ratio and corporate governance disclosures – are more value relevant when considered alongside volunteer commitment. These results suggest that donors view volunteer commitment as a signal of effectiveness and useful in interpreting other measures of effectiveness. Our evidence is more pronounced among sophisticated donors and charitable (relative to medical and educational-oriented), more volunteer intensive, and more complex nonprofits.

The Relationship Between Leadership Behaviors and Volunteer Commitment: The Role of Volunteer Satisfaction.

Despite the relative scarcity of studies on the impact of leadership styles on satisfaction and commitment of volunteers within non-profit organizations, this relationship plays a crucial role in fostering sustained volunteerism and volunteers' well-being. A questionnaire was administered to more than 200 volunteers involved in delivering social services in non-profit organizations from Central and Northern Italy. The questionnaire contained the Volunteer Satisfaction Index, the sub-scale on Affective Commitment of the Organizational Commitment Scale, and two sub-scales of the Key Leadership Behaviors, namely: Helping people to grow and lead, and Enabling learning and innovation. Socio-demographic data were collected as well. Findings revealed that leaders' actions oriented toward the enablement of learning and innovation have an effect on volunteers' affective commitment, through the full mediation of volunteer satisfaction. Leaders' actions oriented toward the growth and empowerment of volunteers, instead, did not show significant relationships with volunteer satisfaction and affective commitment.

A 24-hour online youth emotional support: Opportunities and challenges

A 24-hour online youth emotional support: Opportunities and challenges

Enhancing volunteers capacity in all‐volunteer nonprofit organizations: The role of volunteer leaders' reliance on effective management processes and (de)motivating leadership

AbstractAll‐volunteer nonprofit organizations rely solely on the commitment of volunteers to support their operations. As such, it is important that leaders of these organizations, even though they are volunteers themselves, rely on professional skills in order to optimize their organization's volunteers capacity. In the present study, we investigated how volunteer leaders' reliance on effective management processes and a (de)motivating leadership style related to volunteers capacity. To this end, we relied on the Competing Values Framework (CVF) and Self‐Determination Theory (SDT), respectively. Results revealed a positive (unique) association between (the sum score of) the management processes of the CVF models, as well as (the sum score of) the motivating leadership styles and volunteers capacity. Bivariate analyses indicated that the management processes of each CVF model (i.e., human relations model, internal process model, open system model, and rational goal model) and each motivating leadership style (i.e., an autonomy‐supportive and a structuring leadership style) related positively to volunteers capacity. These findings have important practical implications as they revealed that it is crucial for volunteer leaders to implement effective management processes, while adopting a motivating leadership style.

Predicting the Commitment of Volunteers’ Environmental Stewardship: Does Generativity Play a Role?

This study examined factors that contribute to the commitment of volunteers’ environmental stewardship through motivations, satisfaction, and generativity. Generativity, a focus on the next generation, has not been examined in the content of environmental stewardship. Volunteers for the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department (TPWD) were surveyed online from May to September of 2016 (n = 1111). Through structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis, our findings validated six categories of motivations (helping the environment, project organization, values, learning, career, and social), four dimensions of satisfaction (organizational support, project organization, sense of empowerment, and group integration), and two factors of commitment (affective commitment and normative commitment). Our findings showed positive and significant path correlations for four latent variables (motivations, satisfaction, commitment, and generativity). This study contributes to the literature by showing the potential for generativity to contribute to environmental stewardship, and by enhancing stewardship efforts for agencies and organizations in recruiting and engaging volunteers.

Commitment, resistance and indifference toward diversity amongst community cricket volunteers

Individual commitment to diversity and its link to organizational commitment and change amongst community sport volunteers, is a key debate in the scholarship of sport (Cunningham 2008; Spaaij 2011; Spaaij et al. 2013; Spaaij, Magee, and Jeanes 2014; Melton and Cunningham 2014; Jeanes et al. 2018). Yet details about driving factors and processes which influence volunteer commitment to diversity are relatively unknown (Storr et al. 2020). This article critically examines the attitudinal commitment of volunteers engaging with participants who have intellectual disabilities. Extending the work of Herscovitch and Meyer (2002), the author analyses the attitudinal commitment of 21 volunteers in a community cricket club in Victoria, Australia. Approximately half of the sample showed a mind-set committed to diversity, with the remainder holding indifferent or resistant attitudes. The author concludes that by identifying resistant or indifferent attitudes, clubs can improve inclusion practices amongst volunteers. By changing organizational structures, the link between individual volunteer and whole of organization commitment to diversity can be strengthened, guaranteeing better participation outcomes for people with intellectual disabilities.

Relations among Education & Training, Job Involvement, and Organizational Commitment of Volunteers in Government Departments

Volunteer service is an important indicator for modern countries. Government agencies have positively applied volunteers to assist in the promotion of businesses in past years. Volunteers are active in public sector organizations, and people, due to the effects of recession and frequent disasters, start to present the demand for the quality of service provided by public sectors. When social resources are reduced, relative resources must be effectively applied. For this reason, the government and people show higher demands for the quality of volunteer service to have government departments emphasize the service quality effectiveness and people’s rights. Aiming at volunteer supervisors and volunteers in government departments in southern Taiwan, total 600 copies of questionnaire are distributed for this study, and 476 valid copies are retrieved, with the retrieval rate 79%. The research results reveal positive and significant effects of 1.education & training on job involvement, 2.job involvement on organizational commitment, and 3.education & training on organizational commitment. Finally, according to the results, suggestions are proposed, expecting to help government departments show good training systems, train volunteers meeting the requirements for government departments, reduce the turnover, and enhance the job involvement and organizational commitment to smoothen the service and improve the volunteers’ attitudes.

Community champions: A mixed methods study on volunteer recruitment and retention in community engagement

Community engagement is an effective method of preparing nursing students to be influential providers for diverse patient populations. Over the course of the 2016-2017 academic year, volunteer attendance was recorded and a qualitative survey was distributed to evaluate attendance rates and retention of Community Champion volunteers, and to determine factors that contributed to the success and sustainability of the program. There was an 83% attendance rate overall at the community-based initiatives, with the highest attendance rate of 98% amongst initiative leaders. The following themes emerged from the qualitative surveys assessing retention: 1) Self motivation and enthusiasm among community members 2) diverse and interdisciplinary interactions 3) communication and organization and 4) student commitment barriers. Students with the greatest amount of experience with community engagement assumed more responsibility and dedicated the most amount of time to the program. The consistent commitment of volunteers to Community Champions has positively impacted the students’ academic careers and the sustainability of the community partnership. In order to optimize community programming, volunteer reliability, consistency and commitment are necessary.

Managing Cross-Border Conflicts Through Volunteer Commitment: A Comparative Study Between Religious and Non-profit Organizations in the San Diego-Tijuana Area.

San Diego and Tijuana configure two big cities that have faced each other across the international boundary between United States and Mexico for over 180 years. Within this context, the relationship emerging at the border can be characterized under different categories of individual, social, economic, and political situations connecting each side. Additionally, in recent years, the literature on cross-border conflicts has extensively focused on volunteers as informal agents helping children and other groups of population, but relatively little research has addressed the practical and managerial work and implications of the volunteers themselves. As actors of cross-border communities, volunteers play a relevant role in effective short-term migrants’ settlement, but it is also observed that the profile of volunteers in religious organizations differs from those belonging to non-profit institutions. Grounded on the theories of Planned Behavior and Reasoned Action suggesting that intentions to cooperate with non-government institutions are influenced directly by attitudinal values and indirectly by their beliefs related to social conflicts, this paper analyzes the nature of volunteer commitment in religious and non-profit organizations (NPOs) providing information about managerial practices for newly arrived migrants. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relevance of volunteer commitment as an instrument for managing cross-border conflicts in the particular context of San Diego and Tijuana Area. Based on research using interview data collected from beneficiaries by volunteers, institutional representatives, and documentary references, this manuscript highlights a psychological and individual-centric perspective of volunteer commitment, but it also explores a collective communicative action expanding the range of relevant voices in decisions about volunteering. Moreover, this study provides new insights into how organizational and relational elements impact sustainable volunteer management and points out the role played by attitudes toward non-government institutions such as religious and NPOs demonstrating the relevance of volunteer commitment, transforming part of the positive attitude toward social problems into a significant intention to cooperation. Understanding the importance of the organization’s images in order to attract volunteers, these results show that commitment may become a key determinant of the volunteers’ identity linked to strategies devoted to organizational activities.

Reassessing Charitable Affect: Volunteerism, Affect, and Ethical Practice in a Medical Aid Agency

Charitable aid is sometimes characterized as an activity saturated with emotion, in which outpourings of feeling and care draw individual volunteers to the work (Muehlebach 2012, Adams 2013, Malkki 2015, Caldwell 2017). Yet the affective practice of humanitarian care can take different cultural forms, some of which may not appear deeply affecting. Drawing upon ethnographic research with the long-term US volunteers of a faith-based medical aid organization in Minneapolis/St. Paul, this article develops a linguistically and semiotically informed approach to affect in order to deepen understanding of charitable affect as an actively made experience with cultural variability among long-term charitable volunteers, rather than a singular or stable phenomenon. It argues that affective displays are central to a multifaceted ethical practice through which charitable volunteers seek to demonstrate virtuousness in their ordinary aid activities. The article explores how, within the Minneapolis faith-based organization International Health Mission, volunteer commitment is culturally scaffolded or made socially legible through a combination of conversational exchanges, embodied labor practices, and examples of the ethically disfavored course of action. Applying linguistic and semiotic tools to the analysis of charitable aid illuminates the mechanisms through which affect economies are variously realized, contested, and practiced. Though charitable volunteers may seek to demonstrate a sense of duty or care for other people, the ways they culturally exhibit these complex ethical positions may vary substantially. Charitable work can produce the feeling of participating in a shared social contract, of rectifying the inequalities and failures of the state in some cases. This article concludes that the affect practices central to mobilizing such action may not be the same, nor importantly look the same across charitable endeavors

Committed to Integration: Local Media Representations of Refugee Integration Work in Northern Sweden

The overall aim of this article is to explore the ways in which refugee reception and integration work is storied in the local newspapers of two rural municipalities in northern Sweden. Our results show that the strong emphasis on integration through employment present in national policy regimes is not readily visible in local media portrayals of integration. Instead, integration work is framed as a matter of commitment of individual refugees, volunteers and government administrative staff and, thus, as work with a high level of social support. We argue that the frame of commitment itself needs to be viewed in relation to the growing public support for limiting the resources available for this kind of work, as well as for the limitations for refugees to enter Sweden in the first place.

A School-Based Intervention Using Health Mentors to Address Childhood Obesity by Strengthening School Wellness Policy.

Purpose and ObjectivesThe objective of our study was to strengthen wellness policy in Title 1 schools by implementing a mentored behavior-change model that extends the continuum of care from academic to community settings and mobilizes existing public resources in accordance with US Preventive Services Task Force screening guidelines for childhood obesity management.Intervention ApproachTeam Kid POWER! (KiPOW!) health mentors (students and trainees in medical and health-related fields) in 2 geographically and demographically distinct school districts, the District of Columbia and Orange County, California, delivered standardized health curricular modules to fifth grade classrooms, modeled healthy eating behaviors during school lunchtime, and engaged in active play at recess.Evaluation MethodsInitial interventions in the the District of Columbia and Orange County delivered 10 sessions in which all participants received the intervention. Two subsequent interventions in Orange County, for 5 weeks (Lite) and 10 weeks (Full), included controls. Pre–post measurements of body mass index (BMI) and blood pressure were documented in all participants. A mixed linear regression model, which included a random effect for each school, estimated differences between Full and Lite interventions compared with controls, adjusting for site, sex, and baseline status of the dependent variable.ResultsKiPOW! Full, but not KiPOW! Lite, was associated with a modest reduction in BMI percentile compared with control (KiPOW! Full, P = .04; KiPOW! Lite, P = .41), especially in Orange County (P < .001). Systolic blood pressure improved in Full (P < .046) more than in Lite interventions (P = .11), and diastolic blood pressure improved in both Full (P = .02) and Lite (P = .03) interventions. Annual renewal of the school and volunteer commitment needed to maintain KiPOW! was found to be sustainable.Implications for Public HealthKiPOW! is a generalizable academic–community partnership promoting face-to-face contact between students and trusted health mentors to reinforce school wellness policies and foster youth confidence in decision-making about nutrition- and activity-related behaviors to achieve reduced BMI percentile and lowered blood pressure.

Not for Profit Board of Directors: Getting Organized A Qualitative Study of Chambers of Commerce Governance

This study looks at the complicated relationship between a volunteer board of directors and the best governance solutions to have the organization operate smoothly. By identifying the experiences of the chamber of commerce executives, this study identifies five recommendations for organizing a board of directors for best governance. The study also identifies best practices for selecting board members to serve to increase volunteer commitment and reduce potential conflict among members. This study is informative for any not-for-profit or non-profit organization seeking to organize better and allow the board to focus on the mission of the organization for greater success.

Make It So: Harnessing Technology to Provide Professional Development to Regional Museum Workers

Make It So: Harnessing Technology to Provide Professional Development to Regional Museum Workers

평창 동계올림픽 자원봉사자의 참여동기와 몰입, 만족, 행동의도 간의 관계 연구

평창 동계올림픽 자원봉사자의 참여동기와 몰입, 만족, 행동의도 간의 관계 연구

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Engaging and Disengaging Experiences in Welfare-Sector Volunteering

This paper seeks to reconstruct the specific experiences that strengthen or erode the commitment of volunteers in the welfare sector. The empirical basis is narrative interviews with volunteers who have withdrawn from their role at a welfare organisation in Germany. The findings show tensions: on the one hand, experiences of successful relationships with clients and fellow volunteers strengthen volunteers’ commitment. On the other hand, volunteers observe practices and approaches that run counter to their values. This tension between engaging and disengaging experiences arises from the welfare sector itself, for while care can enable close interpersonal experiences, it is also shaped by economisation. Overall, our study shows that the motivations underlying volunteers’ long-term commitment can be both strengthened and undermined by actual volunteering experiences. In the light of our findings, we present heuristics for understanding volunteering processes that focus on field-specific experiences and tensions.

The Volunteer Recovery Support for Adolescents (VRSA) experiment: Recruiting, retaining, training, and supervising volunteers to implement recovery monitoring and support services

Volunteer Recovery Support for Adolescents (VRSA) is a novel recovery monitoring and support service for youth after discharge from residential treatment for substance use disorders. Study methods and results of a randomized controlled study are presented in a companion paper and provide evidence that VRSA improves pro recovery peer and activity involvement, decreases substance use and related problems, and increases early full remission (Godley et al., under review). This paper describes the VRSA model, how fidelity was monitored, methods used to recruit, retain, train, and supervise volunteers, how well volunteers were able to implement the model, and how adolescents responded to VRSA. As evidenced by successful recruitment of volunteers to cover caseload needs, positive rates of volunteer retention, and favorable recovery support session completion rates, VRSA is a flexible, potentially low-cost model for providing extended recovery support services that is both feasible and acceptable to adolescents. Future research is needed to identify variables that predict volunteer commitment and to investigate if matching gender, race/ethnicity, or other variables affect results.

Volunteer Recruitment, Activation, Commitment and Retention

Volunteer Recruitment, Activation, Commitment and Retention

Strengthening African Population-Based Cancer Registration Through Regional Mentorship: UICC Fellowship Experience at Zimbabwe National Cancer Registry

Background: South Africa (SA) recently established an urban population-based cancer registry in Ekurhuleni metropolitan district in Gauteng Province. The Ekurhuleni Population-Based Cancer Registry (EPBCR) aims to inform cancer policy and comprehensive cancer control programs. The registry covers 3.5 million residents including public/private, rural/urban patients and a mix of the multiethnic SA population. The first complete year's data will be published in April 2018. It is crucial that high-quality data collected by newly established registries are comparable regionally and globally. The Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) fellowship provides a practical opportunity for South African National Cancer Registry staff to learn from the Zimbabwe National Cancer Registry (ZNCR), a well-established population-based registry in the region. Aim: To enhance the SA EPBCR through observation and application of methods for population-based cancer registration used at the ZNCR. Methods: A desktop review of published and unpublished articles/reports of the ZNCR was conducted. Semi-structured informal interviews were conducted with registry staff to understand data processes from case finding to reporting. Representative data sources were visited to understand case-finding processes. Results: The ZNCR was established in 1985 through a collaborative research agreement between the Ministry of Health (MoH) and International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Its activities are overseen by a 17-member constituted multidisciplinary advisory committee. The registry staff comprise one registrar, one executive assistant (EA) and four health information assistants (HIA). The process of ensuring quality data are guided by the African Cancer Registry Network and the International Association of Cancer Registries standards for population-based cancer registries. The ZNCR uses a combination of active and passive case-finding methods where HIAs have unrestricted access to patient information in private and public sectors such as hospitals, pathology laboratories, radiotherapy centers and death registries. HIAs conduct patient interviews for accurate demographics and to complete missing information. Cases are coded according to International Classification of Diseases for Oncology-V3 and Canreg software is used for data entry, quality control and analysis. The hard copies are stored in locked cabinets in offices with restricted access. The data are then used for reporting and research. Conclusion: The support of government, commitment of advisory committee volunteers, highly trained and experienced staff are key elements behind the success of ZNCR. Strict adherence to international practices for population-based cancer registration has enabled ZNCR to produce high-quality data for research and cancer programs. The processes used by ZNCR will be customised and implemented at EPBCR.

Organizational Commitment of Non-Profit Organization Volunteers: A Study on the Save Street Child (SSC) Organization in Malang City, Indonesia

Save Street Child (SSC) is a nonprofit organization in which its main activity is focused on the empowerment of the street children. This research aims at analyzing the effect of organizational culture on organizational commitment, analyzing the job satisfaction as the mediating variable of the organizational culture’s influence on the organizational commitment, and analyzing the volunteering tenure as the moderating variable of the organizational culture’s influence on the organizational commitment. This research involved all of 63 volunteers in SSC organization in Malang City as respondents. Closed questionnaires were used to collect the primary data. Further, the data were analyzed by using the PLS (Partial Least Square). The research results show that the organizational culture affects the job satisfaction, whereas the organizational culture does not have any influence on the organizational commitment. In addition, the job satisfaction influences the organizational commitment, and it also becomes the mediating variable of the influence of the organizational culture on the organizational commitment. The last finding also shows that the volunteering tenure is not the moderating variable of the organizational culture’s influence on the organizational commitment. This study is useful for understanding organizational culture, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment in nonprofit organizations.