When give-back turns to blowback: Employee responses to learning from skills-based volunteering

Abstract

Skills-based volunteering programs are designed by organizations to enable their employees to donate their job-related skills and develop new ones, while making a positive difference in the community. Although skills-based volunteering is one of the fastest growing trends in corporate citizenship, we know little about how employees respond to it. Using interview data from a financial institution (volunteering managers, n = 2; employee volunteers, n = 27), we explored this research question: How do employees react when volunteering is framed as an avenue for learning? Our findings show that one-third of volunteers expressed anger or defensiveness and ultimately rejected the notion of learning from volunteering; two-thirds reacted with curiosity, using the interview process to make sense of what they learned. These two groups of volunteers reported different attributions about why their firm supports volunteering. Whereas the former group was cynical about their firm’s motivations, the latter believed that the firm’s intentions were altruistic. However, not all of the participants fit neatly into this pattern; for a minority, manager support for volunteering altered the relationship between attributions and acknowledgement of learning. The key contribution of this paper is a theoretical model that explains how employees respond when volunteering is framed as a forum for learning.

Keywords:

• Attribution theory
• defensive routines
• employee volunteering
• moral outrage
• sensemaking
• skills-based volunteering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 The first author conducted all interviews with managers of the programs, and employee volunteers.

2 The first author manually coded all of the data and excerpts were sense-checked by the second author.

3 We thank a reviewer for sharing this insight.