THE EFFECTS OF CONNECTEDNESS AND SELF-INTEREST IN THE ORGANIZATIONAL VOLUNTEER DILEMMA

This paper investigates the impact of some of the underlying dynamics of volunteering choices in organizational contexts, focusing on indivi dual, group, and organizational level causes. Three scenario-based exp eriments manipulate individuals' standing within their organization (i .e., whether they are doing well or poorly) in combination with variab les such as the expected efficacy of one's team and positive or negati ve organizational performance. In comparison to other recent volunteer ing studies, all three current experiments focused on an explicit orga nizational context and found much stronger intentions to volunteer, pa rticularly when a person's standing was good The combination of poor s tanding with expectations of poor performance by one's group or one's organization led to reductions in these otherwise strong intentions to volunteer. The results also show that feelings of obligation, expecta tions of extrinsic rewards, and identifying with one's organization ar e all significantly related to volunteering choices.