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.

KEYWORDS:

• Community involvement
• extrinsic motivation
• intrinsic motivation
• motivation
• volunteerism

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arthur A. Stukas

Arthur A. Stukas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Counselling at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and an Executive Editor of The Journal of Social Psychology. His research focuses broadly on how people’s beliefs and expectations about the self, others, and the social world guide their perceptions and their behavior.

Mark Snyder

Mark Snyder is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Psychology and is Director of the multi-disciplinary Center for the Study of the Individual and Society. His research interests include the motivational foundations of individual and collective action, with emphases on the psychology of self and identity, social interaction and interpersonal behavior, and volunteerism and other forms of prosocial action.

E. Gil Clary

E. Gil Clary is the Assistant Provost for Faculty and Academic Administration at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Along with his colleagues Mark Snyder and Arthur A. Stukas, he has been engaged in a program of research on people’s motivations for volunteering that included the development of a measure of those motivations – the Volunteer Functions Inventory.