Volunteers play a vital role in society. People who donate their time and expertise to alleviate societal concerns are a critical resource for nonprofit organizations. Over the past 13 years, volunteering work undertaken by Americans is estimated to have had a value of $2.1 trillion, contributing to helping 670,000 homeless people, 48 million hungry people, and 46.2 million people living in poverty in the United States alone.
Although overall rates of volunteering have been declining, corporate programs that encourage employees to donate their time and efforts are growing. In fact, the number of company employees volunteering is increasing at the fastest rate in the volunteerism sector. What are the conditions that foster corporate volunteering, and what lessons can be drawn for the sector as a whole?
(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
A corporate volunteering climate depends as much on the shared commitment of employees to the cause as on management’s support, according to research published in the Academy of Management Journal.
Jessica B. Rodell, a professor of management at the University of Georgia, wanted to understand to what extent and how management-driven top-down incentives helped nurture a climate in which employees perceive volunteering as worthwhile. Such efforts may risk alienating employees, who “may feel they don’t have an option,” she says, “which they refer to as ‘voluntolding.’” In previous research, Rodell studied individual employees’ motivations to volunteer. In her new work, she examined the role of corporate culture. “I was curious to see whether a company’s effort to coordinate volunteering was effective or detrimental compared to grassroots efforts among the employees,” she says.
Rodell and her three coauthors worked with United Way Worldwide to identify and survey several hundred employees from 50 companies that participated in the organization’s programs. Employees surveyed included those who volunteered and those who did not. To encourage employees to participate in their programs, companies may provide resources such as time off work, transportation, and material goods. These “artifacts” of the company’s underlying culture, the researchers write, are “a manifest way of signaling latent company values to its employees.”
They measured the impact of this corporate volunteering climate by asking volunteer and non-volunteer employees to rate their perceptions of several factors, such as their collective pride in the company’s value system regarding volunteering programs, how this climate affected their sense of belonging, and their intent to participate in company programs or volunteer outside them.
The researchers found that company-provided benefits encouraged a volunteering climate, as did employees’ belief in the cause. In turn, that climate influenced employees’ feelings of belonging and of pride in the company—whether or not the individual employee participated in the volunteering program. “This is an important study showing that a climate of corporate volunteering can foster a sense of pride in and commitment to the company—even among employees who don’t volunteer,” says Adam Grant, a professor of both management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who has written on prosocial attitudes in the workplace.
“The researchers have moved the needle in an important way to provide more incentive for corporations to invest in encouraging volunteerism,” says Christine Letts, Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in the Practice of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School. “That non-volunteers can be affected will help the proponents of programs within companies to argue for the wider benefits of such programs to the company.”
The study also revealed a significant connection between the resources a company put behind its volunteering program and its employees’ belief in the cause. The relationship supported the idea that those two forces can act as substitutes for each other, the researchers found: “In the absence of company-provided resources, employee belief has a significant relationship with a corporate volunteering climate, and vice versa.”
Of the two factors, however, employee belief is more important. “Alone, a company’s top-down initiatives are less effective, though it does not appear to be harmful,” Rodell says. “But these efforts are best realized when done in conjunction with employee passion.”
“From a practical perspective, it won’t surprise anyone that corporate volunteering programs are more likely to flourish when companies put more resources behind them,” Grant says. “But it’s big news that resources matter less than how much employees believe in the cause, and that belief is enough to fuel a climate of corporate volunteering even when the resources aren’t there. Corporate volunteering doesn’t have to be championed from the top down; employees can drive it from the bottom up.”
Jessica B. Rodell, Jonathan E. Booth, John W. Lynch, and Kate P. Zipay, “Corporate Volunteering Climate: Mobilizing Employee Passion for Societal Causes and Inspiring Future Charitable Action,” Academy of Management Journal, 60, No. 5, 2017, pp. 1662-1681.
Read more stories by Marilyn Harris.