The impact of job design on event volunteers' future engagement: insights from the European Football Championship 2008

Abstract

Large sport events increasingly rely on volunteers. However, little is known about the impact these events have on volunteers' future engagement. This study, carried out at the European Football Championship 2008, examines how job characteristics, organizational features, and appreciation affect volunteers' satisfaction and intention to continue their engagement at events and for organizations. Distinguishing between genuine episodic volunteers, current long-term volunteers, and former long-term volunteers, five possible effects on volunteers' intention are proposed: event retention, recruiting, confirmation, comeback, and migration. While organizational features and appreciation primarily affected satisfaction, it was found that specific job characteristics can foster or diminish these five effects. For sport event managers, these findings suggest that in order to create a sustainable event volunteer workforce designing and assigning volunteer jobs is as crucial as attracting volunteers in the first place. Sending organizations, in turn, should pay more attention to which jobs their volunteers are assigned.

Keywords:

• volunteers
• mega events
• job design
• episodic volunteering

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. There is also a useful taxonomy by Stebbins (1996, 2005). In contrast to Handy et al. (2006), this taxonomy does not distinguish volunteer types by their pattern of engagement but volunteer activities by their skill requirement. Serious leisure volunteering refers to activities which require a certain skills base, casual leisure volunteering refers to volunteering which is momentary and requires little skill or knowledge and project-based leisure volunteering refers to short-term and infrequent, yet skill-requiring activities.

2. The effect on future intentions was not expected to be mediated by satisfaction since Hackman and Oldham (1975) proposed in their Job Characteristics Model that job characteristics have direct effects on multiple work outcomes. We regard satisfaction and intention as two separate outcomes, which represent different, but equally important aspects of a successful event volunteering experience.