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Abstract

This paper is part of the Volunteering Australia's Volunteering Research Papers series, to capture evidence on topics related to volunteering, outline key insights for policy and practice and inform the development of the National Strategy for Volunteering. Key Insights: 44% of the global volunteer workforce stopped volunteering over a four-year period, from 2018 to 2021. A loss equivalent to 48 million full-time workers. This policy paper offers an ‘industry summary’ of key findings from a systematic review and meta-analysis of volunteer turnover research. We provide evidence-based recommendations for key actions that will have the greatest impact on volunteer retention and minimizing turnover rates in volunteer-using organisations. A revised definition and measures of volunteer turnover are offered to enable more effective turnover monitoring and management within volunteer involving organisations. This paper provides a valuable resource for addressing the serious and ongoing decline in volunteer numbers. Intended to inform and guide the volunteering sector, National Volunteering Strategy and government policy.
The great (volunteer) resignation:
An evidence-based strategy for
retaining volunteers
Dr Vivien W. Forner, Dr Djurre Holtrop, Dr Darja Kragt and
Associate Professor Anya Johnson
September 2022
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 2
About the Volunteering Research Papers Initiative
The Volunteering Research Papers aim to capture evidence on a wide range of topics
related to volunteering and outline key insights for policy and practice. The Volunteering
Research Papers are peer reviewed, and insights will directly inform the development of
the National Strategy for Volunteering.
The Volunteering Research Papers are an initiative of the National Strategy for
Volunteering Research Working Group.
For more information contact policy@volunteeringaustralia.org
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 3
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based
strategy for retaining volunteers
Dr Vivien W. Forner1, Dr Djurre Holtrop2, Dr Darja Kragt3
and Associate Professor Anya Johnson1
Key Insights
44 per cent of the global volunteer workforce stopped volunteering over a four-year
period, from 2018 to 2021, a loss equivalent to 48 million full-time volunteers.
To enable more effective turnover monitoring and management, there needs to be a
revised denition and measures of turnover that are suitable for volunteer involving
organisations. We recommend the following denition of volunteer turnover be
adopted — “Turnover occurs when a volunteer withdraws their participation with
their current organisation out of their own free will” (Forner et al., 2022). To measure
turnover, we suggest volunteer involving organisations; 1) calculate turnover rate
with organisational data, 2) track volunteer participation – if a volunteer is not
present at any event or activity over 1 year, we would consider the person has
withdrawn their participation with the organisation, or 3) assess turnover intentions.
Our systematic review and meta-analysis of volunteer turnover research identied
four factors that prevent volunteer turnover; 1) support from paid staff, supervisors,
and peers, 2) affording volunteers autonomy, 3) roles where volunteers feel they
are contributing productively, and 4) preventing burnout.
Evidence-based recommendations for key actions that will have the greatest impact
on minimizing turnover rates in volunteer involving organisations include:
Increase social support – create stronger social connections and encourage
support from staff, supervisors, and other volunteers.
Improve the experience of autonomy – when possible, grant volunteers
decision making authority, and when not possible, provide a clear rationale.
Help volunteers feel productive – design volunteering tasks to be
stimulating and clearly related to organisational goals.
Minimize burnout – regularly check with volunteers if they have enough
social, cognitive and physical resources to deal with their task demands.
This paper is intended to inform and guide the volunteering sector, national
volunteering strategy and government policy to address the serious and ongoing
decline in volunteer numbers.
1 University of Sydney. Correspondence regarding this paper can be directed to Dr Vivien Forner,
vivien.forner@sydney.edu.au
2 Tilburg University
3 University of Western Australia
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 4
Addressing turnover in the volunteer sector as a strategic
imperative
The volunteering sector globally is experiencing a signicant and unprecedented decline
in volunteer numbers, the seriousness of which cannot be overstated. From 2018 to
2021, 44 per cent of the global volunteer workforce stopped volunteering.4 This is a loss
equivalent to 48 million full time volunteers in just a four-year period.5 In Australia, the
steady decline in volunteering over the past 15 years has been further exacerbated by
the COVID pandemic and covid-related restrictions and lockdowns that followed.6 In 2020
the percentage of Australians who volunteered for an organisation or group (25 per cent)
was not only lower than in 2019 (30 per cent), but also the lowest rate ever recorded by
the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Implementing an effective and evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteer workers
will be a vital part of strategies to ensure the future sustainability of the Australian
volunteer sector, so it can continue to deliver critical services to the community. Such
strategies require a clear understanding of the reasons underlying volunteer turnover.
Dening and measuring turnover of volunteers
Turnover of volunteers is poorly understood and difcult to measure. Current knowledge
about turnover, including turnover theories, models, and denitions, unequivocally
reect the paid work context. For instance, turnover is often dened as an employee’s
voluntary severance of his or her current employment ties.7 This denition narrows
turnover down to behaviours that an organisation does not control directly (as opposed
to being red from a position), but would like to control indirectly; making it the most
vital type of turnover behaviour to understand and manage. However, these traditional
denitions of turnover do not transfer well to volunteerism, in part because there is often
no formal severance. Volunteers rarely “quit” formally, they simply stop showing up.8 It is
challenging to calculate the annual turnover rate in a volunteering context as it requires
access to accurate and up-to-date data about the number of people who have left the
organisation as well as the total number of people volunteering during a given period.
Challenges with maintaining accurate workforce data and estimating volunteer numbers
4 Forner et al., 2022
5 United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme, 2018; 2021
6 ABS, General Social Survey Results 2006; 2010; 2014; 2019; 2020
7 Mobley, 1982; Price, 1977
8 Jamison, 2003
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 5
are well acknowledged issues in the volunteering sector in Australia and globally.9
Consequently, the volunteering sector needs a way of conceptualising, dening, and
measuring turnover that reects its unique needs and context.
Specically, we propose that “turnover of volunteers occurs when volunteers withdraw
their participation with an organisation out of their own free will”.10 We contrast turnover
with retention and “volunteers are considered retained when they recurrently choose
to be present at volunteer activities and willingly donate their time to an organisation’s
activities and cause”.11 Having an agreed denition of turnover and retention is important
as it provides volunteer involving organisations a way to track their retention and to
identify how changes (both targeted and naturally occurring) inuence turnover. We offer
three suggestions for how volunteer turnover can be operationalised and measured in
volunteer involving organisations, in order of preference based on methodological rigour;
1) calculating turnover rate with organisational data, 2) creating organisational data
tracking volunteer participation, and 3) assessing turnover intentions.
Calculating turnover rate with organisational data.
Some volunteer involving organisations have access to accurate, up-to-date volunteer
records. This is often the case for membership-based organisations that have an annual
registration process, such as some sporting groups or Surf Life Saving. If reliable
organisational data is available, the traditional turnover rate formula can be applied.
Annual turnover rate (%) = number of volunteers who left over the year
total number of volunteers over the year
Creating organisational data – tracking volunteer participation.
As a rule of thumb, if a volunteer is not present at any event or activity over a year, we
would consider the person has withdrawn their participation with the organisation (ie.
turnover). We recommend organisations record attendance at each volunteering event
or activity, tracking the number of times each individual volunteer participates over the
course of the year and comparing it year-on-year. Tracking attendance/participation
would enable the organisation to create an accurate register of volunteers and, by
comparing data from the previous year, calculate the number of volunteers who left
over the period. The approach of tracking volunteer participation would make data
available about a) the total number of volunteers over the year and b) the total number
of volunteers who left over the year, which are the two pieces of information required to
9 https://audit.wa.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/report2015_17-Emergency.pdf; United Nations
Volunteers (UNV) programme, 2018
10 Forner et al., 2022
11 ibid
x 100
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 6
calculate annual turnover rate. It would also provide information about the extent to which
volunteers are engaging with the volunteer involving organisation over the year and how
this varies.
Measuring turnover intention
Turnover intentions are frequently used in turnover research as a proxy measure of
turnover behaviour. Volunteer involving organisations can get an indication of volunteers’
intention to stay or leave through organisational surveys or questionnaires. There are
well established measures of turnover intentions from the management literature that
predict turnover over time.12 Examples of the questions that are typically used include,
“I often think about leaving [organisation name]” and/or “It is likely that I will leave
[organisation name] in the next 12 months”. Volunteers can be asked to respond to these
questions on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5/7 (strongly agree). Alternatively, the
following multiple-choice question may be useful, “Which of the following statements best
describes your feelings about volunteering at [organisation name]?” Choices are A, “I
want to leave, but I feel like I have to stay”, B, “I want to stay, but may have to leave”, C,
“I want to stay, and can stay if I want to”, and D, “I want to leave, and can leave if I want
to”. To gauge the percentage of people who intend to leave, tally up the portion of people
who responded A or D. However, unless all the volunteers in the organisation completed
the survey, survey data may only provide an approximate indicator of turnover intentions
across the organisation.
What are the strongest predictors of volunteer turnover
and retention?
Our broader research team (Forner, Holtrop, Bozeman, Slemp, Kotek, Kragt, Askovic &
Johnson, 2022) undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis of existing volunteer
retention and turnover research. The aim of the research was to delineate the strongest
predictors of turnover amongst volunteer workers. In this Volunteering Research Paper,
we provide a narrative synthesis of the key ndings for industry, summarising what is
currently known about turnover in volunteer organisations and which factors are most
important for retaining volunteer workers.
Overall, three work-related attitudes were found to be most strongly associated with
turnover. These were volunteers’ self-reported engagement, commitment, and job
satisfaction. Whilst it is not surprising that psychological variables were most closely
related to turnover, for the purpose of this policy paper we are focusing on those aspects
that organisations can take practical action on – the way volunteer work is designed
12 For example, Cohen et al., 2016; Van Dick et al., 2004
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 7
and the support structures organisations have in place for their volunteers. Following
the three work-related attitudes above, the next strongest predictors of retention/
turnover of volunteers were; 1) support, from paid staff, supervisors and peers, 2)
affording volunteers autonomy, 3) roles where volunteers feel they are contributing
productively, and 4) burnout. We unpack each of these in more detail.
1. Support from paid staff, supervisor and peers
An area that is particularly important to retaining volunteers is the broad area of social
support or a role that is rich in relational characteristics. Social support includes both
emotional support, such as listening and caring, and instrumental support, such as
tangible assistance or practical help with tasks.13 Support from paid staff and supervisors
were amongst the strongest drivers of retention amongst volunteers. For example,
quality leadership is a critical factor for supporting volunteers, providing recognition and
feedback and creating an overall positive and satisfying volunteering experience.14 The
evidence suggests that support from paid staff and supervisors are strong incentives to
stay, and potentially an even stronger factor in volunteers’ decision to leave when such
support is absent. Tensions between paid staff and volunteers are well documented,
and our research provides further evidence of the importance of this relationship.15 One
way that volunteer involving organisations can improve retention is to focus resources
on training and developing leaders, whether paid employees or volunteers (see also
the Volunteering Research Paper Without leadership there is no volunteering: The
importance of strategic investment in leadership development in Australia by Kragt et al.
for an extensive discussion of leadership in volunteering context).
Supportive peer relationships were also a strong predictor of volunteer retention.
Opportunities for social interaction, where volunteers can socialise and engage in
quality interpersonal interactions to develop supportive and strong relationships, even
friendships, with other volunteers, is an important aspect of the volunteer role.16 Feeling
connected and part of a community of committed volunteers who share similar beliefs
and values about the volunteer cause is an important contextual condition that promotes
volunteer retention. At the same time, it is important to recognize that this is reciprocal
and volunteer involving organisations also play an important role in creating social capital
in a community. Social connection therefore is both a key lever for retaining volunteers
and for creating a stronger community.
13 Semmer at al., 2008; Shakespeare-Finch & Obst, 2011
14 Forner, 2019; Henderson & Sowa, 2018
15 Rimes et al., 2017
16 Nencini et al., 2016
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 8
2. Affording volunteers autonomy
Our ndings also show that autonomy and voice were both strong predictors of
volunteer retention. This means that volunteers who had more freedom to carry out
activities in their chosen way (autonomy) and/or were able to speak up about their
views and inuence matters that affect them (voice) were more likely to remain with the
organisation. Where possible, volunteer involving organisations should seek to empower
volunteers and design volunteering work in a way that affords volunteers freedom to
make decisions, have choices, provide input, and to have some level of control in how
they carry out their volunteering activities.17 For example, whilst volunteer emergency
management organisations cannot allow autonomy in operational tasks, there are many
non-operational tasks, including the day-to-day running of the unit, in which autonomy is
possible and should be encouraged.18 At the same time, when there is a need to follow
standard operating procedures, meaning a lack of autonomy, the rationale should be
communicated and potential volunteer frustrations acknowledged.
Encouraging voice, by providing a platform for volunteers to express their ideas and
suggestions, is also an important element of volunteer retention. If volunteers offer
suggestions or views on changing some aspects of how tasks are performed, these
should be considered. When soliciting feedback, it is important that the organisation
communicates how the feedback was taken into account, because not acknowledging
solicited feedback can have detrimental consequences for morale.
3. Roles where volunteers feel they are contributing productively
Our ndings also revealed that the extent to which volunteers feel they are contributing
productively during volunteering activities was a strong contributing factor in their
decisions to stay or leave. Although volunteers generously give their time to a chosen
cause, volunteers’ time is incredibly valuable. Volunteering has to be time spent
productively. Research and anecdotal evidence suggest that often, due to operational
inefciencies or lack of planning, volunteers ‘sit around’ waiting to contribute, which
leads to their dissatisfaction and turnover.19 Efforts should therefore be made to design
volunteer work to be stimulating and productive, with a clear link to the organisation or
group’s cause or purpose.
4. Burnout
Burnout was strongly associated with more volunteer turnover. Burnout is often
considered to be a combination of two underlying factors: exhaustion and disengagement
17 Forner et al., 2020
18 Muhammad Farid et al., 2020
19 Kragt et al., 2018
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 9
or cynicism.20 When volunteers experience these feelings, they are likely to withdraw from
volunteering.21 Burnout is a known outcome from imbalanced demands and resources,22
meaning that volunteers who experience great demands and who receive little support
are likely to burn out and eventually leave. Following this rationale, providing volunteers
with the resources to overcome the demands of their roles can avert negative outcomes
and even lead to work engagement.23
Policy and practice implications
Existing denitions and models of turnover, that have been developed for paid work
contexts, do not transfer well to volunteerism. We propose an alternative and more
appropriate way to think about turnover in volunteer involving organisations and offer a
list of important drivers of turnover to enable more effective turnover management and
prediction. Our research ndings provide the volunteering sector with an evidence-based
framework for retaining volunteers and minimising turnover rates in volunteer involving
organisations. By delineating which aspects of the volunteering experience have the
strongest impact on intentions to continue or withdraw participation in volunteering
activities, our research offers a valuable resource for addressing the serious and ongoing
decline in volunteer numbers.
Recommendations
Based on the results from our meta-analysis and research, we offer the following
evidence-based recommendations for key actions that will have the greatest impact on
volunteer retention and minimise turnover rates in volunteer involving organisations.
Measure and monitor turnover of volunteers. Effective measurement and
monitoring of turnover is critical to enable organisations to understand and act on
retention issues. We recommend the following measures, in order of preference
1) calculate turnover rate with organisational data, 2) create organisational data
tracking volunteer participation, and 3) assessing turnover intentions via survey
questions.
Improve support from paid staff, supervisors, and peers. Greater clarity
on the role of paid staff and volunteer coordinators, and developing positive
relationships and attitudes towards volunteers, will drive more consistent and
quality support. Focus resources on training and developing those who lead
20 For example, Demerouti et al., 2008
21 Huynh et al., 2012
22 Demerouti et al., 2001
23 Lesener et al., 2019
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 10
and supervise volunteers, including paid employees and leaders who are also
volunteers themselves. Creating opportunities for volunteer socialisation to facilitate
the development of high quality and supportive relationships between volunteers.
The importance of inducting new members into the group is also emphasised.
Onboarding provides both the instrumental and emotional support (e.g making
resources available, welcome activities, assigning a guide or “buddy’) needed to
help the new volunteer socialise and navigate their new team and role.24
Provide volunteers more autonomy and voice. Volunteer activities need to be
designed in a way that affords volunteers freedom to make decisions, have choices
and, where possible, to self-manage their own teams and activities autonomously.
At the same time, volunteers need a platform to voice concerns, offer suggestions,
and have input in decisions that affect them.
Ensure volunteers’ time is utilised productively to make a valuable
contribution. Design volunteer activities to be stimulating and productive, with a
clear link to the organisation or groups cause or purpose. Minimise time volunteers
spend waiting around, by ensuring the volunteer activity or event is well organised/
coordinated and volunteer time is spent contributing in a productive and meaningful
way towards the cause or purpose they are there to serve.
Enhance awareness and management of burnout amongst volunteers.
Burnout is a primary contributor to volunteers leaving an organisation, and a major
issue amongst active volunteers. Monitoring and managing burnout is critically
important to ensure that volunteering activities are not detrimental to the well-
being and mental health of people who volunteer. Effective management involves
minimising the demands placed on volunteers and, at the same time, providing
enough social, physical, and cognitive resources and support. We recommend
organisations regularly check in with their volunteers about their well-being and
identify opportunities where the organisation can minimise the demands and
pressures that volunteers face. Some volunteer positions, by virtue of their task
requirements, might be more likely to create feelings of burnout and should be
monitored especially closely.
Knowledge Gaps and Future Research
Existing theories and current understanding of turnover are unequivocally based on
research with employees in paid work. A model or theory of turnover that reects the
unique volunteering context has yet to be established. The meta-analytical research of
our team is a rst step in this direction, however, further theoretical development and
knowledge about turnover processes amongst volunteers will be required.
An important but unanswered question is, what is a “normal range” for volunteer turnover
rate? We currently lack benchmarking information needed to understand whether an
24 Klein et al., 2015
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 11
organisation is doing well or poorly in regard to its turnover, compared to other volunteer
involving organisations. Turnover statistics in the Australian volunteering sector are not
currently available, in part due to the challenges associated with measuring turnover of
volunteers. We recommend that the sector adopt our suggested measures of volunteer
turnover, which would enable consistent data to be collected and turnover benchmarking
statistics to become possible. Statistics may even differ depending on the type of services
an organisation provides (emergency services, sports, education, health care etc.).
Lastly, like other reviews, we observed that many studies of volunteer turnover are
based on one-off self-report surveys of volunteers’ intentions to leave (ie. cross-sectional
designs), rather than collecting data about real turnover behaviour using organisation
turnover data.25 We strongly recommend future research to draw more often upon
theoretically sound longitudinal and experimental designs. For example, future research
might measure and monitor how factors impact turnover over time (longitudinal designs)
and/or evaluate the impact of interventions designed to improve turnover.26 Additionally,
researchers should work closely together with organisations to obtain data on real
turnover behaviour that is estimated accurately.
Conclusion
Implementing an effective and evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteer workers
will be critical to ensure the future sustainability of volunteering. This policy paper offers
an ‘industry summary’ of key ndings from our recent systematic review and meta-
analysis of volunteer turnover research.27 These ndings provide the volunteering
sector with insights about the strongest determinants of volunteer turnover and,
conversely, the key levers for retaining volunteers. We offer a revised denition and
measures of turnover, with improved relevance and utility for the volunteer context.
The recommendations outlined in this paper are intended to inform and guide volunteer
involving organisations, the new National Strategy for Volunteering, and government
policy more broadly, on how to effectively address the devastating decline in volunteers
across Australia and globally.
25 Kragt & Holtrop, 2019
26 Kragt et al., 2020
27 Forner et al., 2022
The great (volunteer) resignation: An evidence-based strategy for retaining volunteers 12
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... Our research highlights that turnover reasons are distal predictors of actual turnover behavior and that their effects may flow through more proximal predictors including turnover intentions (e.g., Westaby, 2005). We also urge future scholars to collect volunteers' actual turnover data, which VIOs rarely register accurately (Forner et al., 2022). As such, our unique contribution is that we developed a comprehensive framework of turnover antecedents and related this to actual turnover behavior. ...
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Volunteer involving organizations (VIOs) play a vital role in many societies. Yet, turnover among volunteers remains a persistent struggle and VIOs still do not have a good understanding of why volunteers leave. In response, we employed a mixed-methods approach to explore why volunteers consider leaving. By coding textual responses of Australian State Emergency Services and Scouting volunteers ( n = 252 and 2235) on an annual engagement survey, we found seven overarching reasons to consider leaving these VIOs: Conflict, high demands and/or low resources, lack of fit, lack of inclusion, personal commitments and circumstances, poor communication and organizational practices, and poor leadership. When contrasted to the reasons that employees leave organizations for, the lack of inclusion and poor communication and organizational practices seem to be uniquely salient reasons that volunteers consider leaving for. Subsequently, guided by the Proximal Withdrawal States theory and using quantitative data from the Scouts sample, we investigated how reasons to consider turnover can predict turnover intentions and turnover behavior. First, volunteers in different withdrawal states cited different potential turnover reasons. For example, volunteers who ‘wanted to stay, but felt they had to leave’ cited personal commitments and circumstances more frequently than those in different withdrawal states. Second, we found that reasons to consider turnover explained little variance in turnover behavior one year later.
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Not-for-profit and volunteer-involving organizations(VIOs) have not had enough access to the expertise of industrial and organizational (I-O)psychologists, and volunteer managers rarely have access to professional development opportunities that stem from I-O psychology knowledge (Tippins et al.,2023). Through collaborative research partnerships with VIOs, our team of I-O psychology researchers have spent the last two decades building the science to inform and guide evidence-based volunteer management practices that enhance the volunteer journey. Our work spans a great part of this volunteer journey (Kragt &Holtrop, 2019), from helping VIOs attract the right volunteers (Holtrop et al., 2020), to enhancing VIOs' onboarding (Dunlop, Holtrop, et al., 2022), and improving the quality of the volunteering experience through designing better volunteer work (Millette & Gagné, 2008) and enhancing leadership (Forner, 2019; Gagné, 2003). In providing commentary, we hope to enrich the conversation by offering an I-O-psychology researcher perspective on volunteer work to complement the valuable case studies in the focal article.
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Volunteers represent a global workforce equivalent to 61 million full‐time workers. A significant decline in volunteering has highlighted the urgency to better understand and address turnover amongst volunteers. To address this, we conducted a systematic review and meta‐analysis of turnover amongst volunteers. We also examined whether staying or leaving has different predictors. The meta‐analysis integrated and synthesized 117 studies, encompassing 1104 effect sizes across 55 335 volunteer workers, to identify and quantify relationships between turnover and the broad range of variables that have been examined in the volunteer work domain. Amongst the strongest predictors of volunteer turnover were attitudinal variables, in particular, job satisfaction (ρ = −.58), affective commitment (ρ = −.58), engagement (ρ = −.54) and organizational commitment (ρ = −.54). Contextual variables that showed the largest effects included communication (ρ = .62), organizational support (ρ = −.61) and the quality of the relationship between volunteers and their leader (leader‐member exchange, ρ = −.55). We synthesize our findings into an integrative framework delineating the predictors of volunteer turnover. In doing so, we extend turnover research to consider non‐remunerated work contexts and provide a basis for developing turnover theory that is responsive to the unique experience of volunteers.
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Self-determination theory (SDT), offers a theoretical framework for enhancing employee motivation and stimulating positive outcomes such as commitment, well-being and engagement, in organizations. This paper aims to investigate the application of SDT among leaders and delineate practical managerial approaches for supporting basic psychological needs in the workplace. Participants were 51 leaders who had personally applied SDT with their own followers. Data were collected via free-listing method and analysed to extrapolate examples of SDT-application that are both practically salient and aligned to theoretic tenets of SDT. The findings reveal how SDT is operationalized by leaders to support basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness in the workplace. The SDT-informed management strategies are discussed in relation to the literature and alongside case scenarios to illustrate approaches for integrating elements of SDT into day-to-day management activities. Despite extensive literature support for SDT, very little empirical attention has been paid to examining how the theory is applied, interpreted and/or used by practitioners in real world settings. This research is the first to draw on the lived-experience of practitioners who have applied SDT, contributes previously unexplored strategies for supporting workers’ basic psychological needs and responds to calls for SDT research to identify a broader range of managerial behaviours that support employee motivation.
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Background: Increasingly high turnover rates in volunteer organisations have reached critical levels. Australian volunteer emergency service organisations are struggling to maintain adequate volunteer numbers to continue to deliver vital services to the community. The experience volunteers have with their leader is one of the strongest predictors of future volunteering. Despite industry, government and academics calling for increased focus on the training and development of volunteer leaders, there is currently limited theoretical and/or empirical guidance to support this endeavour. Little is known about what leadership approaches are effective or suitable with volunteers. Furthermore, it is unknown how volunteers’ experiences with their leader comes to influence their decision to stay with or leave the organisation. This thesis seeks to address these issues and formulates an evidence-based approach for improving leadership to help retain volunteer workers in Australian emergency service organisations. Aim: The aim of this thesis is to examine the application of managerial autonomy support, an interpersonal style proposed by Self Determination Theory (SDT), as an approach to volunteer leadership, focusing on its potential to retain volunteers. In order to achieve this, the thesis addresses three objectives. First, the hypothesized conceptual model that delineates the relations between perceived managerial autonomy support, followers’ basic psychological need satisfaction, job satisfaction and turnover intention is tested in the volunteer organisations. The second objective is to determine whether, through an SDT-based leadership development intervention, leaders can change and/or develop their managerial orientation towards autonomy support. The final objective is to ascertain whether followers of these leaders perceive changes in their socio-contextual climate during the intervention period. Method: A total sample of 363 participants was obtained for this study, comprising 167 leaders and 196 followers across four volunteer emergency service organisations in Australia. A quasi-experimental design tested the impact of an SDT-based leadership intervention on leaders (n=65) and their followers, compared to a control group of leaders (n=102) who received no training. Leaders’ self-reported managerial orientation was assessed at pre-test, post-test and one year after the intervention. Followers’ perceived managerial autonomy support from the leader, basic psychological needs satisfaction, job satisfaction and turnover intention were measured before and after their leader completed the intervention. Results: A test of the hypothesised model via structural equation modelling indicate that emergency service workers’ perceptions of leaders’ managerial orientation influenced their job satisfaction and subsequent turnover intention through basic psychological needs satisfaction. Testing the impact of the SDT leadership development intervention, leaders in the experimental condition changed their interpersonal orientation towards autonomy support after completing the intervention and these reflected enduring changes that remained evident one year later. The intervention was most effective for leaders with relatively little prior experience leading volunteers, who showed greater propensity for developing their managerial orientation. Followers did not report any significant changes in the provision of autonomy support from their leader, basic psychological need satisfaction, job satisfaction or turnover intention over the nine weeks their leader was participating in the SDT-based leadership development intervention. Contribution/Implications: This thesis provides one of the most in-depth empirical explorations to date, of the malleability of managerial autonomy support amongst organisational leaders. A contribution is made to the scholarly study of volunteer leadership more broadly, by offering a validated theoretical model of leadership and its influence on followers in the volunteer context. This research provides support for Self-Determination Theory in the volunteer organisations.
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Objective Australian research on volunteering is rich and diverse, but also increasingly fragmented. In an attempt to promote a more integrated study of volunteering, we review volunteering research conducted in Australia, using volunteering journey as a framework. Specifically, we summarise literature on volunteer characteristics, motivations, benefits, psychological contract, commitment, and withdrawal. Method A comprehensive review yielded 152 studies on volunteering conducted in Australia. Results We find that volunteers have distinct characteristics, such as being older, better connected, employed, and residing in rural areas. There are a variety of reasons that prompt individuals to volunteer, and this motivation does change over time. Volunteering leads to better psychological well‐being, as well as increases in social and human capital. Volunteer expectations and commitment are key drivers of ongoing volunteering. Finally, stress, work–family conflict, and negative interactions with others lead to volunteer withdrawal. Conclusion A lot is known about volunteering, however, future advancement of the field will depend on better integration across disciplines and domains. Currently, volunteering is viewed as a set of distinct stages, and a more integrated approach is required. We also note a lack of theoretical and methodological rigour in many Australian studies on volunteering.
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The quality of the relationships between volunteers and paid staff can have far-reaching consequences for organizations that utilize volunteer programs to support service delivery. We utilize a mixed methods case study design to explore volunteer and staff perceptions of their mutual interactions within a large library system in the southeastern United States. We consider which areas of these interactions might be vulnerable to conflict. Our findings suggest that conflict is likely to arise due to communication problems, behavioral or attitudinal issues, perceptions of job vulnerability, divergent expectations, lack of trust, and workflow integration hurdles. We argue that to avoid these tensions and promote effective service delivery, staff members must have appropriate training and preparation to interact successfully with volunteers.
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