(Illustration by Yarel Waszul)
Lots of nonprofit associations rely on volunteers to fill important leadership roles, and the effort to recruit and retain such leaders raises a pressing question: What motivates people to serve in that capacity—even in the absence of compensation or coercion?
The answer to this question has profound implications for the health of civil society. “Societies that have more people who participate in voluntary organizations have stronger, better-functioning democracies,” says Matthew Baggetta, assistant professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University. “It’s important to understand these organizations, because they play such an important role in political advocacy, in public service, in connecting citizens to each other, and in teaching us how to be good citizens.”
Baggetta was part of a team that undertook a study of the Sierra Club to discover what drives leadership commitment when the rewards of serving as a leader don’t include a paycheck. The team collected data related to 1,616 volunteer leaders from 368 Sierra Club chapters. Baggetta and his colleagues then analyzed various determinants of behavioral commitment among those leaders. For their metric of commitment, the researchers used the number of hours each leader devoted to Sierra Club activities.
The researchers found that individual situational and personal characteristics—applicable skills, available time, motivational alignment—are indeed significant indicators of leadership commitment. Far more important than a leader’s individual qualities, however, are the features that characterize his or her team. The factors that really matter, Baggetta says, are “how well that team works together, what it does, and how it organizes what it’s doing.” In particular, the team characteristics that appear to foster commitment among volunteer leaders include strong team interdependence, a sharing of workloads, and a minimal amount of time spent in meetings.
To assess how much influence each variable had on leaders’ commitment, Baggetta and his colleagues used a multilevel regression analysis to create hypothetical models of two Sierra Club leaders. First, they posited an ideal leader who has a lot of free time and a high level of motivation, and they placed this leader on the least favorable kind of team (one in which members work separately, share duties unequally, and spend large amounts of time in meetings). Then they reversed the situation. They posited a far-from-ideal leader who has a full-time job and only a moderate level of commitment to environmental issues, and they placed this leader on the most favorable kind of team (one in which members work interdependently, share duties evenly, and hold highly focused meetings).
Somewhat counterintuitively, the leader in the first model (the person with the most-desirable characteristics) actually demonstrated a lower degree of commitment than the leader in the second model (the person with the least-desirable characteristics). The first leader devoted just 8 hours per month to Sierra Club activity, whereas the second leader devoted 44 hours each month to the organization. “In reality, these people don’t exist,” says Baggetta. “But [this exercise] gives a sense of the relative impact of individual versus team factors.”
Perhaps the most salient takeaway from this research involves the deadening eff ect that meetings can have on the “purposive motivational piece,” as Baggetta calls it. “This paper clearly shows that too many meetings lead to some kind of decline in leadership commitment,” says Edward T. Walker, assistant professor of sociology at UCLA. Lisa Renstrom, a former Sierra Club president who helped implement changes at the organization in response to the researchers’ work, notes that this finding proved to be especially valuable. “It was just amazing how such a simple thing as meeting process, and the efficacy of holding one as opposed to three meetings, had on outcome,” she says.
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.