This chapter provides an overview of the study and addresses the background of the study, problem statement, rationale of the study, significance of the study, purpose of the study, scope of the study, research questions, and definitions of terms.
Background of the Study
Volunteers are significant contributors to the community who serve in the non-profit organizations (NPOs) to administer a wide array of social and psychological welfares for the community. As the world undergoes a series of unexpected natural disasters, financial and political crisis and deals with the problem of aging population and poverty, there is an increase reliance on volunteers over the past two decades (Brudney, 1992; Cnaan & Cascio, 1998). Non-profit organizations exhibit the core characteristics of being organized, private, non-profit-distributing, self-governing and voluntary (Salamon & Anheier, 1997). In most countries, NPOs serve significant roles in social welfare legislation, demographic and cultural shifts, increased prosperity and a changing role of the state (Ben-Ner & Gui, 1993). The key success to enhance the development of non-profit organizations depends on managing and retaining non-profit workers.
The presence of numerous non-profit organizations around the world has challenged non-profit workers to develop strategies in sustaining financial and human capital. Volunteers are one of the most important human capitals of non-profit organizations. In the era of globalization, a number of voluntary organizations have
expanded overseas to promote social welfares at the international market. This further diversified the pool of volunteers. Volunteers cannot be considered as one large homogenous group, but are individuals of all ages with diverse backgrounds and a variety of experiences and skills (Bussell & Forbes, 2002). Non-profit organizations not only need to understand what motivates volunteers to join but also what keeps them stay in the organization (Bussell & Forbes, 2002).
In contrast to the paid workers in the private sector, the volunteers in the non-profit sector are not motivated through monetary or instrumental rewards (Pearce, 1993). Instead, volunteers find the activity itself to be intrinsically rewarding. The main concern of managing volunteers is that the voluntary organizations cannot force volunteers to work on a fixed schedule like a paid employee; volunteers decide themselves whether or not to devote to an activity. Consensus are even harder to reach when individuals have different opinions on what is considered adequate management styles in planning, organizing and leading voluntary activities. One aspect of voluntary personnel is that volunteers desire to make personal contribution and do not wish to be managed or supervised (Cnaan & Cascio, 1998). Every individual have their own way of doing things. Managing a diverse group of volunteers may become difficult as individuals come from different backgrounds and have diverged perceptions toward voluntary activities. Volunteers often have flexible working schedules and do not always feel bound by the norms and values of an organization.
They may pay less attention to the requirement to report or to follow administrative instructions (Cooley, Singer, & Irvin, 1989; Milligan, Maryland, Ziegler, & Ward,
1987). In addition, volunteers often recruited themselves into the voluntary organization and may choose to leave whenever they want. Non-profit agencies may be reluctant to evaluate the work of volunteers because devoting to community service is considered to be priceless, while evaluating volunteers may question their efforts (Cnaan & Cascio, 1998).
Problem Statement
Voluntary associations or organizations are described as “groups of people who offer the chance to come together with others to create or participate for collective benefit” (Bishop & Hoggett, 1986, p.198). When volunteers involve themselves in a non-profit organization, they are concerned with their participation, shared objectives and resources, mutuality, and fairness (Lohmann, 1992). Pondy (1967) has identified four aspects of conflict: (1) antecedent conditions (e.g. scarce resources), (2) affective states (e.g. tension or anxiety), (3) cognitive states (e.g. cognitive conflict of perception of conflict), and (4) conflictual behavior (overt disagreement or resistance).
Schwenk (1990) proposed that volunteers do face conflicts when it comes to the competition of scarce resources, diverged perceptions, and disagreements of a matter.
Conflicts get tense when emotions are involved among the group. How organizations deal with conflicts will form a perception of justice, or the lack of it, among members.
Therefore, it is interesting to study how organizational justice perceptions may affect volunteer’s psychological attachment to the organization.
Rationale of the Study
Since volunteers are described as labor in an organizational context, unpaid and without any obligations, for the benefit of others and/or society (Meijs, 1997), to better assess the retention of volunteers in non-profit organizations, affective commitment was found to be relevant in volunteer organizations (Dawley, Stephens,
& Stephens, 2005; Preston & Brown, 2004; Stephens, Dawley, & Stephens, 2004).
Meyer and Allen (1991) described that affective commitment has a negative direct impact on turnovers. In addition, affective commitment was found to be the strongest form of commitment to attendance and performance of the job (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002). Thus, affective commitment is chosen as the outcome variable of this study.
Gardner and Lambert (1972) identified motivations in two basic orientations (not types) – instrumental and integrative orientations. In the instrumental side of dichotomy (or extrinsic motivation), a volunteer who choose to participate in voluntary work has the intention of attaining instrumental goals such as networking, and career development. The integrative side (or intrinsic motivation) describes more of those who wish to integrate themselves into the values of the organization and do volunteering for self-interest, enjoyment, and inherent satisfaction (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Clary and Snyder (1999) have discussed that different people engage in the same volunteer activity do possess different motivations to commit in volunteerism, ranging from the need of achievement, power, affiliation (McClelland, Atkinson, &
Lowell, 1953), for the altruistic and egoistic motives (Horton-Smith, 1981), and to the
functional motives of values, understanding, career, social, esteem and protective (Clary, Snyder, & Ridge, 1992) with the additional functional dimensions of reciprocity, recognition, reactivity and social interaction (Esmond & Dunlop, 2004).
Pinder (1998) described that motivation is “a set of energizing forces” (p.11), which will enhance individuals’ course of action or behavior (Meyer & Herscovitc, 2001,
p.301). Thus, the two aspects of volunteer motivations: intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are proposed to have a positive and significant impact on affective commitment.
Organizational justice was defined as three major aspects: distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice (Bies & Moag, 1986; Folger & Konovsky, 1989). Prior research has linked justice perceptions to organizational outcomes including outcomes of job satisfaction (Martin & Bennett, 1996; Mossholder, Bennett,
& Martin, 1998), organizational commitment (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001;
McFarlin & Sweeney, 1992), trust in management (Brockner, Siegel, Daly, Martin, &
Tyler, 1997; Bruning, Keup, & Cooper 1996), and turnover intentions (Daly & Geyer, 1994). However, limited researches were done to examine perceived justice specifically on affective commitment. Greenberg (1990a) refers to organizational justice as people's perceptions of the fairness of treatment received from organizations, and is an important rubric used to explain effective functioning of organizations.
Researchers have found that individuals who perceive fairness and procedural justice can serve to maintain intra-group harmony (Schroeder, Steel, Woodell, & Bem-benk, 2003) and allow people to be more cooperative (DeCremer & Tyler, 2004).
Adams (1965), Thibaut and Walker (1975), Bies and Moag (1986) Greenberg (1987a), and Rawls (1999) have distinguished two major forms of organizational justice as distributive and procedural justice. Distributive justice deals with the “ends”
achieved (what the decisions are) or the content of fairness, whereas procedural justice is related to the “means” used to achieve those ends (how decisions are made)
or the process of fairness (Greenberg, 1990a). Although Colquitt (2001) have advanced the discussion of organizational justice to include also interpersonal and informational justice, organizational justice is most commonly referred to as distributive and procedural justices (Barling & Phillips, 1993). Bies and Moag (1986) proposed interactional justice to be the third type of justice (Aquino, 1995; Barling &
Phillips, 1993; Bies & Shapiro, 1987; Skarlicki & Folger, 1997; Tata & Bowes-Sperry, 1996). In addition, Moorman (1991) had found that interactional justice appeared to be a stronger predictor in determining employees’ behavior in organizations than
formal procedural justice.
On the other hand, many studies argued that the procedural justice has a stronger relationship with organizational commitment than distributive justice (Cohen-Charash
& Spector, 2001; Kernan & Hanges, 2002; Martin & Bennett, 1996). Lowe and Vodanovich (1995) argued that there is a stronger relationship between distributive justice and organizational commitment than for procedural justice. Nevertheless, these studies were conducted only through employees in private organizations. Therefore, this study seeks to include distributive, procedural and interactional justice as predictors of affective commitment among non-profit workers.
Significance of the Study
Even though volunteers are not paid, they still desire to feel wanted, appreciated and invested. The key to manage volunteers effectively is to add more knowledge about how to improve commitment among volunteers through their perceptions in the organization and their motivational patterns when engaging in a volunteer activity. To improve human resource management among the non-profit organizations, more attention is needed on what stimulates volunteers’ pro-social behavior that strengthens their long-standing engagements in voluntary organizations.
Little researches have been conducted to explore the issues of what factors contribute to better commitment among volunteers (Cnaan & Casio, 1998). Allen and Meyer (1990) described affective commitment as the sense of emotional attachment to the organization. An individual may feel an emotional bond with an organization, for example, one feels that he or she is ‘part of the family’ for the organization and feels as if the organization’s problems are one’s own. Affective commitment has been extensively used to examine employees in the for-profit organizations (Meyer et al., 2002). The contribution of the study is to apply affective commitment on volunteers in the non-profit organization setting to examine how volunteers’ perception on fairness in the non-profit organizational systems relates to their attitudes and behaviors of commitment.
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of the study is to empirically test the relationship of motivation on affective commitment in the non-profit organization and non-paid workers context,
also to provide additional insights of volunteers’ perceived organizational justice on affective commitment. Specifically, this study explores how different types of volunteer motivation may impact their attachment to the organization. The perceived organizational justices are examined in three dimensions: distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. These perceived justices are included in this study as moderators to examine whether they impact the relationship between volunteers’ motivation and affective commitment. The result of the study will hopefully help add knowledge to the relationships among the studied variables.
Scope of the Study
The scope of the study is limited within the accessible population collected for this study. All data collected were collected from a non-profit, voluntary organization in Taiwan. The researcher decided to study volunteers in one specific non-profit organization so that organizational level variances can be controlled, and that study results can be better interpreted with insights from the organization. The analysis of this study is at the individual level focusing on volunteers’ perceptions and attitudes toward the organization.
Research Questions
The following questions were developed for the study to answer:
1. What is the relationship between types of motivation and affective commitment among volunteers?
2. Will perceived organizational justice (distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice) have a moderating effect on the relationship between types of motivation and affective commitment?
Definition of Terms Volunteer
Volunteers are “a person who, out of free will and without wages, works for a not-profit organization which is formally organized and has as its purpose service to someone or something other than its membership” (Jenner, 1982, p.30).
Affective Commitment
The affective attachment is “the attachment of an individual’s fund of affectivity and emotion to the group” (Kanter, 1968, p.507), or also described as “the relative strength of an individual’s identification with and involvement in a particular organization” (Mowday, Porter, & Steers, 1982, p.27).
Volunteer Motivations
Volunteer motivations are individual’s engagement in volunteer work to achieve important psychological and social goals and those different individuals will seek to satisfy different beliefs and behaviors through volunteer activity (Smith, Bruner, &
White, 1956; Katz, 1960; Clary, Snyder, & Stukas, 1996).
Perceived Organizational Justice
Perceived Organizational Justice is defined as “employees overall perception of their organizations of what is fair in the workplace” (Moorman, 1991, p.845).