Setting expectations during volunteer recruitment and the first day experience: a preregistered experimental test of the met expectations hypothesis

ABSTRACT

In a preregistered experimental study that draws from the met expectations hypothesis, we examined how volunteer recruitment messaging can shape expectations of new volunteers prior to their first day, and whether meeting or failing to meet expectations on the first day would affect satisfaction. By experimentally manipulating a recruitment poster, we set either a transactional (i.e., by volunteering, one can learn new skills) or a relational expectation (i.e., one can work in a team). Participants then viewed an experimentally determined vignette that depicted their first day as a volunteer as either being rich in, or bereft of, experiences of teamwork and learning new skills (crossed). We found that recruitment messaging strongly impacted the participants’ expectations of the volunteering experience prior to their first day. Neither meeting expectations regarding teamwork nor learning new skills played a statistically significant causal role in determining satisfaction. By contrast, richer experiences notwithstanding expectations, and especially those pertaining to learning new skills, were more important determinants of satisfaction. Polynomial regression analyses supported the experimental results, namely that experiences far more strongly determined satisfaction than did expectations. We conclude that providing richer experiences to volunteers is more important than expectation management for volunteer satisfaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Met expectations
• volunteering
• recruitment
• experiment
• preregistered

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We note that training and development is construed as a relational element of a psychological contract by Rousseau (1990) and others (e.g., Jensen et al., 2010), as it signals a longer-term investment in an employee by an employer. We return to this matter in the Discussion section.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre. We also thank Dr Blythe McLennan for ongoing support throughout the project, Mr Angus Hughes for assisting with the polynomial response surface plots, and Professor John P. Meyer for advice on an earlier draft. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Additional details regarding the methods, materials, and manipulation checks, full raw data and SPSS analysis syntax, and pre-registration information are provided in the project’s OSF pages:Direct link to pre-registration: https://osf.io/698dqMaterials and data: https://osf.io/k4qgf