NVSQ Blog

“I know where my boundaries are”: Understanding volunteer psychological contracts

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Michelle Cleveland¹, Debra Gray², Rachel Manning³, and Kim Bradley-Cole⁴

¹University of Chichester, UK, ²Kingston University, London, UK, ³University of Worcester, UK, ⁴University of Winchester, UK

“We want to volunteer because we want to be part of making the difference”

“We are all there for each other”

“I’m doing this because I don’t want to let my colleagues down”

Experiences of volunteering often highlight depth of commitment. This commitment is often collective in nature: We do it together, we do it for others. We do it because we are part of a ‘we’. And yet, while experiences of volunteering often highlight the profound impact on – or, indeed, how volunteering is part of – people’s identities, volunteers leave. So how well do we understand what volunteers expect from the organisations they give their time to?

Commitment to volunteering is finite and breakable. Volunteering commitments are not straightforward commitments: they are often conditional and are part of reciprocal expectations. Volunteer-organisation relationships also differ from employee-employer relationships in a variety of fundamentally different ways (Nichols, 2013). Volunteers don’t leave because they will get paid more somewhere else.

When North-South Partnerships Evolve: What Happens When the Balance Begins to Shift?

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Michel Majdalani¹, Lea Stadtler², and Charles-Clemens Rüling²

¹Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon, ²Grenoble Ecole de Management, France

Picture a familiar scene in international development: A well-established organization from the global North partners with a hospital, school, or community-based group in the global South. Expertise travels South. Funds travel South. Protocols and standards are adapted. Over time, the Southern partner grows stronger, but the partnership remains marked by asymmetry. So what happens when the Northern partner changes direction? And what possibilities arise when the Southern partner is ready not just to receive, but to lead?

Our recent study, published in NVSQ¹, examines exactly this question through the evolution of a long-standing North-South twinning relationship in global health. The case shows that partnerships do not have to end in conflict, withdrawal, or dependency. They can evolve.

More specifically, we show how a Southern organization built on the resources gained through collaboration, while the Northern organization shifted into a more supportive, less directive role. Over time, the relationship moved toward greater balance, not by cutting ties, but by reshaping them.

What can we learn about and from dropouts?

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Andreas Kewes

German Sport University Cologne, Germany

This blog post is a travelogue. It describes my journey into the world of volunteering, which culminated in my research article “Dropouts in Volunteering and the Role of the Multidimensional Experiential Space.” The journey began in the early 2010s. At that time, my colleague Chantal Munsch from the University of Siegen, Germany, and I wanted to find out why people drop out of volunteering for charitable organizations. We were familiar with research on lack of resources, i.e., the research insight that volunteers give up their involvement due to lack of time, for example. However, this result seemed too individualized to us. We wanted to know whether social situations and group conflicts played a greater role in these withdrawals than had previously been assumed. That is why we focused our sample on welfare organizations: in Germany, they clearly originate from milieus such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or the working class, for example. At the time, we thought we could show that such milieus of engagement still exist, that they shaped the organizations, and that new volunteers were bothered by this. To further emphasize this perspective in our sampling, we interviewed former volunteers with their own migration histories, because we thought they would certainly be outside the milieu ties.

The Individual-Altruism Nexus: Rethinking Motivation in International Development Volunteering

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Anthony Fee¹, Peter Devereux², Cliff Allum³, and Phoebe Everingham⁴

¹University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia, ²Murdoch University, WA, Australia, ³University of Birmingham, UK, ⁴Macquarie University, NSW, Australia

Research on international volunteering has long reported on the complex motivations volunteers bring to their international assignments (e.g., Meneghini, 2016). Yet these studies rarely consider how the decision to volunteer fits within the broader sweep of volunteers’ careers – particularly when volunteers are highly skilled professionals and when the decision to volunteer introduces substantial opportunity costs, including financial compromises and professional and personal disruptions. Why do skilled professionals accept long-term assignments as international development volunteers (IDVs) that interrupt, or set back, their career trajectories? And how do they reconcile the costs and benefits of volunteering from a career perspective?

Our study of fifty highly skilled Australian IDVs examined these questions by exploring how career and altruistic motives intersect in volunteers’ decisions to serve abroad. Research shows that volunteers whose personal needs are fulfilled report higher satisfaction, remain engaged for longer, and are more effective in achieving development outcomes during their assignments (Nencini et al., 2016). Thus, these dynamics are of interest to organisations and communities that host volunteers, as well as to the international volunteer cooperation organisations (IVCOs) that recruit, place, and support volunteers.

Several of our findings break new ground in understanding IDVs’ motivations. Almost all the volunteers in our study described being at a professional transition point when they commenced their assignment: entering the workforce, reconsidering their career direction, seeking renewal, or closing a professional chapter. Their assignment was rarely viewed as a one-off career hiatus. Instead, the participants’ narratives were characterised by a deliberate attempt to integrate their professional capability with prosocial work that they hoped to continue after their assignment. The decision to volunteer, therefore, had altruistic and strategic goals – a means of entwining their professional capability with a (more) meaningful career that would extend well beyond the assignment’s duration.