We examined the separate influences of volunteers’ personal motives and their team leaders’ behaviors on volunteer satisfaction and contributions, along with mediating processes suggested by self-determination theory. Participants were 302 volunteers who worked in teams at various sites through a central agency. As predicted, both personal motives for volunteering and transformational leadership influenced volunteer satisfaction through enhanced work meaningfulness and higherquality team relationships. However, motives that predicted volunteer contribution were different from those that predicted satisfaction. Whereas satisfaction was positively associated with motives concerning esteem enhancement and value expression, contribution was positively associated with motives to gain understanding and negatively related to motives pertaining to esteem enhancement and social concerns. Transformational leadership was positively associated with volunteer satisfaction, but not with volunteer contributions. The theoretical ramifications of these findings are discussed, along with practical implications for the recruitment and retention of volunteers.
MOST AMERICANS BELIEVE THAT volunteerism helps create a better world (Independent Sector 1988). In addition to benefiting its direct recipients, volunteerism can also benefit the volunteers themselves and society as a whole (Snyder and Omoto 2007; Wilson 2000). Considered in economic terms, the dollar value of volunteerism in the United States was calculated to be $169 billion in 2009 alone (Corporation for National and Community Service, Office of Research and Policy Development 2010). Moreover, it has been argued that volunteerism and other forms of citizen participation play an essential role in combating problems that face the world. Because many of these problems are caused by human action, they require further human action in order to be successfully managed (Snyder 1993).
Discussion
We examined the influence of volunteers’ personal motives and their leaders’ behaviors on volunteer satisfaction and contribution, along with the processes mediating these influences. As hypothesized, higher levels of transformational leadership were associated with greater volunteer satisfaction, with evidence that this link was mediated by enhanced meaningfulness of the work and higherquality team relationships. However, transformational leadership was not associated with volunteer contributions in this study. Moreover, as hypothesized, volunteering in order to express humanitarian values predicted greater volunteer satisfaction, and this link was found to be mediated by enhanced meaningfulness of the work.
