Five Stages Of Volunteer Motivation

Volunteer motivation

People use their time and efforts to volunteer for various reasons (Bang & Ross, 2009). It means that different volunteers may have different reasons for the same activity or may have same reason in various activities. (Cuskelly et al., 2006) Also, volunteer motivations are that people want to help others and for a personal or social benefit. (Hoye et al., 2008) In this regard, there are numerous studies about the motivations of sports volunteers that using different models or scales as follows: Olympic Volunteer Motivation Scale (OVMS) (Giannoulakis et al., 2007), five factors (altruistic value, personal development, community concern, ego enhancement, and social approval) (Wang, 2006), five factors (solidary, purposive,

This study involved 2,444 participants from different 15 organizations. In addition, this study included three studies and five stages, which are pilot study one (stage one), pilot study two (stage two and three) and main study (stage four and five). The purpose of the pilot study one and two was to revise the original VMI. Then, the stage four of the main study was to investigate the motivation of volunteers using the revised VMI developed by Pilot study two. The revised VMI of stage four including 41 survey items associated with ten factors of volunteer motivation, which consist of seven motivational factors (without ‘value’) developed by McEwin and Jacobsen-D’Arcy (2002) and three factors from the Pilot Study Two (Religious, Government, Community). In stage 4, the main motivation factor is Reciprocity followed by Recognition and Personal Growth, whereas the least motivation factor is Career development. In the results of question statements, reflected that “I volunteer because I believe I am meeting a need in the community in my volunteering role” was the main reason for volunteering, followed by “I volunteer because I feel that volunteering makes the world a better place”. (Esmond & Dunlop, 2004, p.33)

Shye (2010) mentioned that SQOL is based on the more general Faceted Action System Theory. (Shye 1985a) Shye (2010, P.188-189) explained that “The theory defines the ‘‘quality of life’’ of any system as the system’s effective functioning in various ways.”. In addition, as Shye (2010, P.189) identifies that “the domain of human functioning may be partitioned, first, into four subsystems: The personality (or mental), the physical, the social and the cultural. Each subsystem, in turn, is further partitioned into four subsystemic functioning modes: the expressive, the adaptive, the integrative and the conservative. This leads to the 16 human functioning subsystemic modes. Furthermore, this study used 16 questionnaire items to present 16 modes such as “improves the volunteer’s social Status” and “enables the volunteer to develop friendships”. (Shye, 2010, P194) According to the study, Shye (2010, p.198) revealed that “the opportunity to develop friendships and gaining a sense of belonging to a community, are the most important motivations for volunteering”. In addition, Shye (2010, p.198) also revealed that “relief from personal worries and improvement of one’s economic conditions are the least important potential motivations.” Most importantly, this research is not as same as the previous research on motivations of