Abstract

FERREIRA, Marisa; PROENCA, Teresa  and  PROENCA, João F.. Motivations in volunteer work . Rev. Portuguesa e Brasileira de Gestão [online]. 2008, vol.7, n.3, pp.43-53. ISSN 1645-4464.

This research intends to critically review and discuss literature about volunteers’ motivations to donate their time to NGO’s. The more an organization knows its volunteers, the better this organisation will be able to meet the needs and expectations of these individuals. Therefore, to understand motivations that can make individuals donate their time to a certain organisation is an important issue for NGO’s management. Firstly, this paper examines the state-of-the-art in formal voluntarism and the motivations associated with the work of direct service volunteers. We illustrate the results of an analysis conducted in bibliographical databases that include specialised journals in voluntarism research. This discussion is followed by a presentation of a typology that organises different volunteers’ motivations in four groups: altruism, belonging, ego and social recognition and learning and development. Finally, three gaps in the literature of volunteers’ motivations that can justify additional research are identified: omission of differences between motivations related with volunteers’ ‘attraction’ versus ‘retention’; focus of the investigations in North American and Australian contexts; and absence of comparative analyses that relate motivations by NGO types.

Keywords : Motivations; Volunteers; NGO’s; Non Governmental Organisations.

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