Understanding and encouraging volunteerism and community involvement

Abstract

Volunteerism and community involvement have been demonstrated to offer benefits both to communities and to volunteers themselves. However, not every method to encourage these behaviors is equally effective in producing committed volunteers. Drawing on relevant theoretical and empirical literatures, we identify features of efforts that are likely to produce intrinsically motivated other-oriented volunteers and those that may produce extrinsically motivated self-oriented volunteers. In particular, we explore ways to socialize young people to help and ways to build a sense of community focused on particular issues. We also examine requirements for community service and other approaches that highlight self-oriented benefits that volunteers may obtain. Finally, we return to a focus on the importance of intrinsic motivation for promoting sustained involvement in volunteers, even as we acknowledge that volunteers who come with extrinsic or self-oriented reasons can still offer much to communities and can be satisfied when their activities match their motivations.

Full text

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 1
Understanding and Encouraging Volunteerism and Community Involvement
Arthur A. Stukas Mark Snyder E. Gil Clary
La Trobe University University of Minnesota Kutztown University
Please address correspondence concerning this article to Art Stukas, Department of
Psychology and Counselling, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3086, Australia. Tel.
61-3-9479-1515. Email: A.Stukas@latrobe.edu.au.
Stukas, A. A., Snyder, M., & Clary, E. G. (2016). Understanding and encouraging
volunteerism and community involvement. The Journal of Social Psychology, 156,
243-255.
9 February 2016

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 2
Abstract
Volunteerism and community involvement have been demonstrated to offer benefits
both to communities and to volunteers themselves. However, not every method to encourage
these behaviors is equally effective in producing committed volunteers. Drawing on relevant
theoretical and empirical literatures, we identify features of efforts that are likely to produce
intrinsically motivated other-oriented volunteers and those that may produce extrinsically
motivated self-oriented volunteers. In particular, we explore ways to socialize young people
to help and ways to build a sense of community focused on particular issues. We also
examine requirements for community service and other approaches that highlight self-
oriented benefits that volunteers may obtain. Finally, we return to a focus on the importance
of intrinsic motivation for promoting sustained involvement in volunteers, even as we
acknowledge that volunteers who come with extrinsic or self-oriented reasons can still offer
much to communities and can be satisfied when their activities match their motivations.
(150 words)
Keywords: volunteerism; community involvement; motivation; intrinsic motivation;
extrinsic motivation.

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 3
Understanding and Encouraging Volunteerism and Community Involvement
Every year, millions of people around the world contribute time and effort for
organizations that provide help to people and groups in need, with contributions taking the
form of social support, physical assistance, organizing and advising, ensuring that group
activities can function, or acting on behalf of causes or movements designed to improve
quality of life. In many domains, core activities of people’s lives would be disrupted if
volunteers were not present to provide much needed help; for example, schools, health
clinics, animal shelters and countless other organizations rely heavily on the labor of
volunteers.
There have now been several decades of research on volunteering and community
involvement from a psychological perspective (see Stukas, Snyder, & Clary, 2015, for a
review). The general consensus is that the prosocial actions of volunteers offer numerous
benefits not only to communities but also to volunteers themselves (Snyder, Omoto, &
Dwyer, in press). While we are not saying that volunteering has no costs or downsides or that
all such activities are worth promoting (e.g., Clary & Snyder, 2002), on balance, bringing
people together in ways that enhance and improve the lives of community members has been
shown to be a good thing. Thus, the next step is to find ways to promote community
involvement and volunteering and to determine the factors that influence when and why
volunteer engagement leads to positive rather than to nil or negative outcomes.
In our earlier writing on “social marketing” efforts to attract volunteers (e.g., Stukas,
Snyder, & Clary, 2008), we divided potential targets of recruitment efforts into three groups:
those ready to volunteer, those open to good offers to volunteer, and those resistant to
volunteering. Although it is not entirely clear why a person might fall into one or another of
these categories (and it may depend on the particular type of activity on offer), research has
identified numerous personal antecedents of volunteer activity, such as dispositional traits,

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interpersonal skills, and demographic characteristics (e.g., Omoto, Snyder, & Hackett, 2010;
or Wilson, 2012, for a review). This research raises the question of whether stable personal
characteristics lead people to volunteer, and whether non-volunteers without these stable
characteristics might be encouraged to get involved. Our earlier focus on people “open to
good offers” suggested that recruitment messages that target the important goals of particular
potential volunteers can work. However, methods to encourage those resistant to volunteering
seemed to have very mixed results. Moreover, not every “good offer” will result in sustained
commitments to volunteering even if volunteers are attracted for the short term.
In this article, we provide a conceptual overview of the factors underlying efforts to
promote volunteerism and community involvement, focused primarily on the ways in which
these efforts influence sustained patterns of volunteering. As we do so, we integrate the seven
articles that appear in this special issue of The Journal of Social Psychology on
“Volunteerism and Community Involvement” with the existing research literature.
Throughout the special issue, the authors investigate factors that make volunteering more
likely, satisfying, or sustained, ranging from informal and formal efforts focused on young
people to the broader motivating influences that lead adults to get involved. In the literature
and in the special issue itself, there is a tension between approaches that rely principally on
the intrinsically motivating aspects of volunteerism and community involvement and those
that rely on extrinsic motivators to encourage service. We hope that our analytic
considerations in this article, as well as the contributions of the articles in this special issue,
will help move this debate toward a resolution.
Socialization
Efforts to develop an ongoing commitment to prosocial behavior might work best if
they begin early, by encouraging young people to engage in such actions. Modelling of
giving and volunteering by parents, including offering opportunities for children to get

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involved, can set the stage for later prosocial behaviors by children (e.g., Eisenberg, Eggum-
Wilkens, & Spinrad, 2015; Staub, 2005). For example, McGinley, Lipperman-Kreda, Byrnes,
and Carlo (2010) demonstrated an indirect effect of parents’ own volunteering (and
encouragement of their children) on Israeli teens’ volunteerism; this relationship was
mediated by teens’ feelings of sympathy and self-perceptions of helpfulness. A civic family
orientation (operationalized as the extent to which the family discusses and gets involved
with community and political events) may also contribute to the amount of volunteering that
adolescents do (e.g., Van Goethem, van Hoof, van Aken, de Castro, & Raaijmakers, 2014).
As Luengo Kanacri et al. (this issue) suggest, one pathway to wider civic and community
engagement may be through donations to charities of choice; parents might encourage young
people to use their spending money in this positive way to later good effect. Ensuring that
such actions are attributed internally to prosocial concern and not externally to extrinsic
rewards or pressures would seem to be important in this regard (e.g., Fabes, Fultz, Eisenberg,
May-Plumlee, & Christopher, 1989).
Parents can also encourage prosocial attitudes and behavior through nurturant actions
toward their own children, including displays of warmth, use of authoritative but not
authoritarian parenting styles, and conversations about moral issues (see Eisenberg et al.,
2015, for a review). Resulting feelings of empathy or sympathy for those in need and
internalized prosocial values are likely to boost rates of volunteering and community
involvement (see Stukas et al., 2015). In addition, children who develop secure attachment
styles as a result of their bonds with parents are also more likely to volunteer later in life
(Gillath, Shaver, Mikulincer, Nitzberg, Erez, & Van Ijzendoorn, 2005).
Through socialization, children may learn that helping can make them feel good or
reduce negative feelings (e.g., Cialdini, Baumann, & Kenrick, 1981). These hedonistic goals
for prosocial behavior may relate to the desires for self-enhancement and protection from

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 6
negative self-perceptions that have been identified as important motivations for volunteering
(e.g., Clary, Snyder, Ridge, Copeland, Stukas, Haugen & Miene, 1998). Socialization can
also help children to make the transition from normative helping (responding to social
sanctions) to autonomous helping (acting on internalized values), categories identified by
Rosenhan (1970) that are a function of both relations with parents (warm vs. ambivalent) and
parental modeling of helping behaviors (explicit or hypocritical). Yet, even those people who
have not experienced an upbringing that lends itself to internalized and autonomous helping
may be encouraged through specific situational factors and interventions to get involved in
their communities and to persist in their social actions (e.g., Clary & Miller, 1986). So, there
is hope that those who are not dispositionally inclined toward helping or who do not benefit
from childhood environments that encourage such action can be subsequently influenced
toward community involvement.
Sense of Community
The socialization of young people may also include introducing them to existing
communities and helping them to feel a sense of belonging to these groups. Religious
organizations are prominent examples and indeed religious participation has long been
associated with volunteering and community engagement (e.g., Hustinx, van Essen, Haers, &
Mels, 2015; Maton & Domingo, 2006). However, geographical communities such as
neighborhoods, towns, and cities also engage residents, young and old, through events and
opportunities to get involved. As Omoto and Packard (this issue) report, a strong sense of
community is associated with increased volunteering. This sense of community may be
location-based, as in their Study 1 of retirement community dwellers, or it may be a
community focused on an important issue or avocation, as in their Study 2 of environmental
volunteers. Omoto and Snyder (2002, 2010) have outlined how community can be both the

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environment (physical or not) in which involvement takes place and also the continually
changing collective process that people build through their efforts and identification.
Building a new community or instilling a sense of community may not be as easy as
introducing new members to thriving existing communities. We already know that many
volunteers are recruited by people from their social networks (Musick & Wilson, 2008;
Omoto & Snyder, 2002); this suggests that levels of social capital are linked to getting
involved, although social capital may be both cause and consequence (e.g., Flanagan, Kim,
Collura, & Kopish, 2015). But how can a sense of community be created or promoted to get
the ball rolling? Omoto and Snyder (2010) have used small-group workshops to foster a
psychological sense of community in people who have an initial interest in, and a concern
for, those affected by HIV and AIDS. Compared to a no-workshop control, their intervention
boosted sense of community and more importantly, boosted intentions to engage in different
forms of social action, such as giving money and volunteering for relevant community
organizations. Similarly, Thomas, McGarty, and Mavor (2015) drew on Kurt Lewin’s (1947)
ground-breaking studies showing that group interactions increased women’s willingness to
serve offal to their families during wartime, and demonstrated how 30-minute discussions of
a United Nations program designed to provide safe water to developing countries could boost
action tendencies and social identification in students. Thus, bringing people together in small
groups and working with them to create a feeling of shared sense of community may boost
their willingness to get involved in prosocial action.
Collaborative tasks can even increase prosocial behavior across previously delineated
group lines by invoking identification with a larger superordinate ingroup (e.g., Dovidio et
al., 1997). Whether it is appropriate to call these new ingroups “communities” is an open
question, but promoting new ways of construing group memberships may be the first step
toward building a broader sense of community. As Stürmer, Rohmann, and van der Noll (this

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 8
issue) demonstrated, even efforts to encourage people to identify with as large a group as all
humanity may help to promote volunteerism for global causes. McFarland, Webb, and Brown
(2012) also revealed that an individual difference measure of Identification with All
Humanity predicted willingness to donate money for international relief efforts. Such efforts
may represent a form of “collectivism”, or actions designed to improve the welfare of a
group, one of the primary motivations for community involvement identified by Batson,
Ahmad, and Tsang (2002).
Under ordinary circumstances, however, most people may tend first to their own more
circumscribed ingroups or communities to the extent that they feel or are encouraged to feel
that they identify with them. This preference for ingroup helping may be more common in
longstanding and stable residential communities (e.g., Lun, Oishi, & Tenney, 2012). Thus,
some helping can be a closed system, creating bonding social capital where the social ties are
strong and inward-looking within groups (Putnam, 2000) but not bridging capital where ties
are weaker but span between groups. However, despite its benefits for social inclusion, we
must acknowledge that the promotion of “outgroup helping” can be complicated. When status
relations between groups are unstable, high powered groups may prefer to provide help that
keeps the other group in a position of dependency, whereas low powered groups may prefer
to receive help that promotes autonomy and self-help and may even reject dependency-
oriented help; see Nadler (2015) for a review. Indeed, diversity within communities is often
negatively related to rates of volunteering, possibly because it relates to a lack of trust
between people in different groups (e.g., Rotolo & Wilson, 2014). The implications are that
communities may be easier to build when they are homogeneous and promote ingroup
helping. However a moral imperative to create and sustain communities of people who are
willing to offer autonomy-oriented help to outgroup members in need would yield a host of
benefits both to recipients and to society (see Snyder et al., in press), not least because this

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 9
form of help promotes equality, self-sufficiency, and social inclusion, principles that are held
in high regard in democratic societies (e.g., Jiranek, Kals, Humm, Strubel, & Wehner, 2013;
Nadler, 2015).
Service-Learning and Other Requirements to Serve
Some communities may rely on explicit social norms, and even actual social pressure,
to encourage their members to engage; for example, religious communities invoke moral
prescriptions to act benevolently (e.g., Johnson, Memon, Alladin, Cohen, & Okun, 2015).
However, other communities may also decide to use requirements to encourage and even
force involvement and prosocial action. For example, in the United States, residents of public
housing are subject to a Community Service and Self-Sufficiency Requirement (e.g., Seattle
Housing Authority, 2016) that involves eight hours of service (for those not engaged in paid
employment for at least that amount of time) with the objective of improving resident well-
being and self-sufficiency.
The most common use of requirements to engage in community service is in the
educational arena, where service-learning programs can be promoted as offering both benefits
to knowledge and benefits to communities. Indeed, the outcomes of service-learning
programs are varied and there can be no doubt that participants benefit in many ways (see
Stukas, Clary, & Snyder, 1999, and Yorio & Ye, 2012, for reviews). For example, Flanagan
et al. (2015) found that participating in community service activities increased adolescents’
reports of both bonding and bridging social capital and more so than participating in other
extracurricular activities; this benefit did not change depending on whether the service was
mandated or freely chosen. Thus, one benefit of even required activities is to expose students
to new people and to allow them to develop trusting bonds, both within groups and across
groups – this could bolster the development of a new broader psychological sense of
community, a further spur to involvement (as discussed above).

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At the same time, other studies suggest that prosocial motivations or intentions to
engage in future community service or volunteering may be undermined by requirements, at
least for a subset of participants. Our own research on “mandatory volunteerism” (Stukas,
Snyder, & Clary, 1999) found that university students who felt that requirements were
controlling or who claimed to be “not ready” to volunteer had lowered future intentions
compared to students who did not find the requirements as intrusive. More recently, in a
longitudinal study of more than 16,000 secondary school students, Horn (2012) found that
students showed increases in prosocial value orientation after engaging in community service
for humanitarian organizations -- but not when they felt explicitly pressured (or even strongly
encouraged) to do so. Institutional requirements to engage in community service were not
effective in boosting the prosocial values of students who were initially egoistic in their value
orientation, but requirements did not undermine the values of those who were originally more
prosocial. However, freely chosen community service had much stronger effects on the
internalization of prosocial values than required service for all students, including those
originally more egoistic. These findings corroborate longitudinal studies showing that
students who were originally positive toward volunteering when required sustained their
service activities further into the future than students who were less positive from the start,
particularly if they had engaged in a lot of service, required or not, during high school (e.g.,
Hart, Donnelly, Youniss & Atkins, 2007; Planty, Bozick, & Regnier, 2006).
To prevent some students from experiencing reactance against efforts to encourage
their involvement, programs promoting community service by educational institutions need
to be implemented with care, as suggested by Dienhart et al. (this issue). Dienhart et al. found
that required programs that were not properly introduced in terms of their rationale and
benefits could be interpreted by students as an extra burden which consequently undermined
their motivation to serve in the future. Thus, more clearly explaining why required

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community service programs fit with students’ own goals may be one possible solution. The
functional approach to understanding volunteerism argues that volunteer experiences that
allow participants to satisfy their most important motivations will be the ones that lead to
greater satisfaction and potentially other benefits and those that do not fulfill motives will be
less likely to do so (see Stukas, Worth, Clary, & Snyder, 2009). Therefore the undermining
effects of requirements may be ameliorated if participants can choose their own opportunities
or, better yet, be placed in service activities that are expected to offer benefits that are
matched to students’ primary motivations (but see Houle, Sagarin, & Kaplan, 2005, for a
caveat). Indeed, in a recent study of university business students in a required service-
learning program, Nicholls and Schimmel (2012) demonstrated that the extent to which
students saw their motivations fulfilled in their activities (as assessed by the Total Match
Index; Stukas et al., 2009) was a strong predictor of their future intentions to volunteer,
mediated by both positive attitude change toward service and satisfaction.
Another possibility for avoiding reactance is to increase the amount of “autonomy
support” that is offered by the volunteer placement organization, where efforts are made to
encourage people’s sense that the behaviors to be undertaken are personally desirable and
freely chosen (Gagne, 2003). Perceptions of autonomy support were negatively associated
with volunteer turnover (but only marginally predictive of hours volunteered) in Gagne’s
study of animal welfare volunteers. A further study by Millette and Gagné (2008) examining
volunteer position characteristics demonstrated that a position’s perceived motivating
potential (including perceptions of the variety of activities included, the impact on the lives of
other people, the level of autonomy, and the amount of performance feedback available) was
positively correlated with both volunteers’ satisfaction and supervisors’ ratings of volunteer
performance. Given that perceptions of controllingness and a lack of autonomy by helpers
have been related to reduced intentions to volunteer in the future (e.g., Stukas et al., 1999),

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reduced quality of help and reduced well-being for volunteers (e.g., Weinstein & Ryan,
2010), it seems important to ensure that any requirements or even strong encouragements to
engage in community service are tempered by efforts to retain volunteers’ perceptions of
freedom and intrinsic motivation.
External or Extrinsic Motivations to Volunteer
Requirements to engage in community service are but one external factor governing
the initiation of involvement, and in fact, there are many incentives for volunteering (e.g.,
Snyder et al., in press). Benefits for career advancement are a key tangible outcome for many
younger volunteers (see Clary et al., 1998; Snyder et al., 2000). These and other self-oriented
motivations (e.g., esteem enhancement, self-protection) may offer real benefits to volunteers,
particularly if service activities allow volunteers to fulfil these motivations when important
(e.g., Stukas et al., 2009). However, more self-oriented motivations may be associated with
reduced intentions to continue volunteering in the future and with lower psychological and
physical well-being (Gebauer, Riketta, Broemer, & Maio, 2008; Konrath Fuhrel-Forbis, Lou,
& Brown, 2012; Stukas, Hoye, Nicholson, Brown & Aisbett, 2016).
As Güntert, Kals, Strubel, and Wehner (this issue) point out, in line with self-
determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), the extent to which motivations are associated
with feelings of autonomy and self-determination or feelings of control may be one of the
keys for discovering when and why certain motivations produce positive effects and others
do not. Theoretically, any goal can be pursued because it is self-determined and driven by
intrinsic processes, or because of some degree of control exerted through rewards or
punishments, including experiences of guilt or shame. However, extrinsically motivated
activities are typically associated with reduced persistence, as compared to intrinsically
motivated activities (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2000). Therefore, volunteerism to gain instrumental

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self-benefits or to avoid negative emotions might not be sustainable and might not improve
well-being.
One reason why helping that is required, pressured, or controlled does not increase
well-being may be because it has been associated with lower needs-satisfaction (for
autonomy, relatedness, and competence) than helping that is freely chosen and self-
determined (e.g., Weinstein & Ryan, 2010). Yet, as Okun and Kim (this issue) conclude,
there may yet be a positive effect of being pressured into volunteering if this results in high
rates of behavior, at least with regard to purpose in life. Similarly, other concrete benefits
may accrue regardless of volunteers’ motivations, as long as they are afforded by the service
activities involved (e.g., Flanagan et al., 2015). Moreover, external influences to get involved
might only undermine the experiences and benefits of those who perceive the activities and
the pressures used to encourage them negatively (e.g., Horn, 2012; Planty et al., 2006;
Stukas et al., 1999).
In our own studies (e.g., Clary et al., 1998; Stukas et al., 2009), we have focused on
the ways in which the volunteer environment can be tailored to provide motivation-matching
benefits to volunteers and on demonstrating how this can predict greater satisfaction with
volunteering and higher intentions to continue. Following from the functional theories of
attitudes (Katz, 1960; Smith, Bruner, & White, 1959), we have identified six primary
functional motivations to volunteer that we assess with the Volunteer Functions Inventory
(VFI; Clary et al., 1998): to express important values; to increase understanding of the world,
an issue, other people, or one’s own abilities; to experience self-enhancement and positive
feelings toward the self; to fulfil the social expectations of one’s friends, family, and
reference group; to gain a protective benefit against negative feelings and self-beliefs; and to
secure career opportunities and advancement. Moreover, we have demonstrated how an
understanding of the motivations of potential volunteers can assist with the design of

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recruitment messages to attract them (e.g., Clary et al., 1998; Clary, Snyder, Ridge, Miene, &
Haugen, 1994). However, we have never explicitly discriminated between self-determined
and controlled motivations, seeing this as an orthogonal and qualitative dimension that might
characterize the same goal differently for different volunteers under different conditions. In
contrast, Güntert et al. (this issue) argue that some of the motivations that we have studied,
particularly the values and understanding motives, are relatively more self-determined than
others.
Other researchers have contrasted self-oriented egoistic and other-oriented altruistic
motivations without invoking self-determination theory. Typically, values motivation is
declared to be the only purely altruistic motivation (e.g., Cornelis, Van Hiel, & De Cremer,
2013; but see Omoto et al., 2010, who include community concern, a seventh prominent
motivation, as altruistic) with all of the other motivations involving some egoistic self-
oriented benefits. However, looser operationalizations that classify social or even
understanding motivation as other-oriented also exist (e.g., Konrath et al., 2012; Stukas et al.,
2016). In contrast, Finkelstein (2009) categorized only career as an external motivation,
judging the other five motivations to be internal, in that they could be satisfied within the
context of the volunteer activity itself. Generally, researchers have found that egoistic, self-
oriented motivations are associated with smaller effects or poorer outcomes but some
exceptions exist. For example, Omoto and Snyder (1995) found that egoistic motivations
were a significant predictor of volunteer longevity whereas more altruistic motivations were
not, suggesting that people with purely altruistic motivations may burn out. Cornelis et al.
(2013) found that self-oriented motivations were important predictors of “in-role” volunteer
behaviors, those that involve living up to the expectations of the role, whereas other-oriented
motivations predicted “extra-role” behaviors that go beyond what is expected. Nevertheless,

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promoting volunteering and community involvement by advertising extrinsic rewards and
benefits may result in a mixed bag of effects.
Although we argue that any important motivation that is fulfilled in a volunteer’s
experience should be satisfying and should lead to sustained behavior (e.g., Snyder et al.,
2000), we recognize that there may be constraints on this principle. For example, some
motivations, such as those focused on career or understanding goals, could be satiated by
sustained activities, as when volunteers meet the contacts and develop the skills that enable
them to secure paid employment or when they learn all there is to learn about a particular
issue or experience. Even activities that are matched to and fulfil primary motivations may
not promote ongoing commitments if terminal goals are the sole focus of volunteers. Indeed,
in our studies, volunteers’ satisfaction is generally more strongly influenced than future
intentions to volunteer by the matching of motivations to service activities (e.g., Clary et al.,
1998; Stukas, Daly, & Cowling, 2005; Stukas et al., 2009). Moreover, effect sizes for both
outcomes are typically smaller for matching of self-oriented motivations, particularly career
and protective motivations. Fortunately, in our administrations of the VFI, we have often
found values motivation to be rated most important, and, because volunteer activities are
generally framed in terms of their humanitarian or prosocial goals, this motivation may also
be relatively easy for volunteers to feel that they have fulfilled. As such, volunteers who have
strong needs to express and to act on their personal values may be easiest to attract and to
sustain.
Intrinsically Motivated or Values-based Community Involvement
Thus, we return full-circle to our emphasis on socialization and sense of community,
suggesting to those seeking to promote volunteering and community involvement that interest
in particular issues and specific groups needing help is the main driver of sustained
community service. To the extent that young people can be encouraged to internalize

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 16
prosocial values and attitudes and to become involved (or to create) and to identify with
communities focused on social issues and people in need, then we expect volunteerism and
service to be more likely to become a mainstay of their lives. We are mindful that the
assessment of values-related motivation in the VFI focuses specifically on humanitarian and
altruistic values, but the expression of other personal values and beliefs should also lead
people to volunteer (see Shye, 2010), perhaps particularly for organizations that are not
specifically humanitarian in focus. Research that has investigated this issue has generally
found that the self-transcendence values, universalism and benevolence in Schwartz’s
typology (see Schwartz, 2010, for a review), are most associated with volunteer behavior
(e.g., Plagnol & Huppert, 2009). These values focus on enhancing the welfare of a personal
network (benevolence) or the welfare of all people and of nature (universalism); similar
associations have been found with a different measure of values that contrasts non-
materialistic with materialistic values (Kang et al., 2011).
Such broadly applicable values could be expressed by a variety of prosocial
behaviors. So, making it clear to this subset of people (those who are ready to volunteer;
Stukas et al., 2008) that there are ways to get involved may be sufficient to attract them. As
Bekkers and de Witt (2014) have pointed out, awareness of the need for volunteers is often a
sufficient factor in motivating people to get involved, particularly in the case of disaster relief
and other high profile emergencies. However, building a sense of community around
important issues that are intrinsically motivating to people with prosocial values and relevant
attitudes and providing them with behavioral pathways for expressing them may be a more
viable way to promote community involvement. This is the focus of Omoto and Snyder’s
work on the community of people affected by HIV and AIDS (e.g., 1995, 2002, 2010).
A desire to uphold important moral and philosophical principles may also underlie
some decisions to volunteer. For example, Batson et al. (2002) identified “principlism” as a

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significant motivation for community involvement; that is, acting on a moral principle, such
as social justice or social responsibility. Jiranek et al.’s (2013) recent inclusion of a social
justice function into the VFI reflects this focus. Creating a community around a moral
principle or on behalf of a group that deserves assistance on moral grounds may be one route
toward attracting and reinforcing those with similar beliefs. Indeed, focusing on the most
disadvantaged within a community and on improving their future outcomes through the
delivery of autonomy-oriented help (e.g., Luengo Kanacri, et al., this issue; Nadler, 2015)
may be an appealing avenue for action for those with prosocial and social justice related
attitudes.
Ensuring the future stability and health of our communities and all members within
them may actually be a crucial motivating aspect of their work for volunteers. Omoto and
Snyder (2010) proposed that people with a strong sense of community act on the belief that
“the community itself is an entity and resource worth sustaining, nurturing, and growing” (p.
237). As such, Maki, Dwyer, and Snyder’s research (this issue) highlighting how taking
future time perspectives can promote continued service may be consistent with such a
motivation. Maki et al. demonstrated that future time orientations may be dispositional but
also that they may be experimentally induced, yielding hope that people may be led to orient
toward prosocial actions that will benefit future members of their community through simple
means. Similarly, recent work by Bain and colleagues (e.g., Bain, Hornsey, Bongiorno,
Kashima, & Crimston, 2013; Milfont, Bain, Souza, Gouveia, & Kashima, 2014) suggests that
people may be most motivated to hold attitudes and to perform actions in the present to the
extent that they believe these actions will promote benevolence traits (morality and warmth)
within their society in the future. Promoting volunteering and community involvement as
pathways to this collective future of greater trust and cooperation, or to other beneficial
futures, may increase willingness to engage in such activities.

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Although one might be tempted to think that a focus on the future would be a primary
motivator only for the young, research on the construct of “generativity”, a life task focused
on offering mentoring and guidance to the next generation (e.g., Erikson, 1963), suggests that
volunteering can be motivated by this purposefor adults of all ages (e.g., Snyder & Clary,
2004). As Snyder and Clary (2004) point out, generativity could be considered an other-
oriented motivation, similar to value expression, with less of a focus on obtaining immediate
benefits; in fact, some generative actions might be focused proactively on preventing future
problems rather than on addressing those problems already manifested. Snyder and Clary
(2004) and de Espanés, Villar, Urrutia, and Serrat (2015) have found modest correlations
between the motivations to volunteer assessed by the VFI (Clary et al., 1998) and the Loyola
Generativity Scale (McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992). However, generativity was not strongly
related to values motivation, suggesting instead that it might reflect separate concerns not
encompassed by the VFI. Generativity did not differ across age groups and was a strong
predictor of volunteer commitment in Argentinian volunteers (de Espanés et al., 2015). Thus,
highlighting how volunteers’ contributions may make a difference for future generations may
be another route to recruiting those who may already be inclined to volunteer.
Having the chance to act on one’s important values and principles or to make
contributions to the future of communities may be intrinsically motivating. However, most
definitions of intrinsic motivation focus on the sheer enjoyment of activities themselves;
therefore, simply put, people may choose to volunteer because they find it fun. For example,
Omoto and Snyder’s (1995) research demonstrated that satisfaction was a significant
predictor of volunteer longevity. Vecina et al. (2012) found that volunteer engagement,
assessed as a multifactorial construct comprised of vigor, absorption, and dedication,
predicted satisfaction in new volunteers but ongoing commitment in more established
volunteers. Moreover, people may treat volunteering as a form of “serious leisure” (see

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 19
Stebbins, 2015), committing to their activities with the same enthusiasm that they might give
to a career.
Another approach has been to examine volunteers’ varying interests in different types
of activities. Maki and Snyder (in press) have developed a Volunteer Interest Typology (VIT)
that assesses preferences for different activities, including those that focus on animals or the
environment as well as preferences for delivering dependency-oriented or autonomy-oriented
help. Their research suggests that volunteers with different motivations may be attracted to
different ways of volunteering; similarly, Clary, Snyder, and Stukas (1996) and Stukas et al.
(2016) reported motivational differences for volunteers who served different types of
organizations (focused on health, education, sport, young people, etc.) doing different types
of tasks (administrative, mentoring/befriending, fundraising, etc.). Of course, identifying
preferences for certain activities is not equivalent to determining that volunteers find these
activities intrinsically motivating because other extrinsic benefits may be available and
driving such preferences, but the absence of strong interest or engagement in the activities at
hand may suggest a lack of intrinsic motivation. Making certain that activities match the
interests of volunteers seems an important way to keep them motivated (e.g., Maki & Snyder,
in press).
Concluding Comments
Based on our considerations of the relevant theoretical and empirical literatures on
volunteerism and community involvement, we are optimistic that it is possible to build an
engaged society and even to recruit and involve those who are currently resistant to
volunteering. However, we are sensitive to the possibility that methods to encourage
community involvement may potentially result in two different classes of volunteers: those
who are primarily other-oriented and intrinsically motivated and those who are primarily self-
oriented and extrinsically motivated. Although no real harm (and potentially a lot of good)

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 20
may be achieved by volunteers who are self-oriented and extrinsically motivated, their
commitment to sustained service may be lower than that of volunteers who are more other-
oriented and intrinsically motivated. However, volunteers with more intrinsic motivation and
other-oriented goals may receive more personal health and well-being benefits as a result of
their service. Therefore, methods that encourage people to develop and to internalize a
compassionate motivation to help others in need of their help may result in the most benefits
for all.
As we have seen, certain types of socialization experiences and encouragements to
build and to identify with communities focused on shared prosocial values and beliefs may
make other-oriented volunteerism more likely. Conversely, terminal extrinsic goals and
explicit requirements may result in self-oriented volunteerism that is not sustained for the
long-term. A fortunate caveat is that some heavy-handed efforts to encourage community
service do not seem to negatively impact those who have internalized altruistic and
humanitarian values. Moreover, the extent to which volunteers see that their motivations and
interests can be (and actually are) satisfied in the activities available to them is likely to be an
important influence on their decision to get involved and to remain involved.
We close, then, on a positive note, after considering relevant exemplars from the
literature that point to productive ways in which volunteering and community involvement
can be promoted to increase benefits for all. We are mindful, however, that a number of the
issues covered here have not been definitively resolved. Therefore, we look forward to a
future of more research on these topics and to its systematic application to promote
community involvement and an engaged society.

ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 21
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