Presenta: Katerina Gonzalez, Suffolk University.
Abstract: Employee volunteering is widely assumed to benefit both employees and organizations, but prior research often treats volunteering as a unitary activity. We argue that this obscures an important distinction between volunteering employees pursue independently and volunteering sponsored by their employing organization. Personal volunteering is likely to be meaningful because it is often self-directed, autonomy-supportive, and aligned with employees’ personal values. Corporate-sponsored volunteering, however, may generate additional benefits because it links prosocial action to the organization, strengthening organizational pride, identification, and reciprocity. Across four complementary studies—a meta-analysis of 87 independent samples with over 105,000 individuals, nationally representative U.S. Census data, a field study of volunteers in an entrepreneurship training program, and an organizational-level study of aspiring B Corporations—we compare the outcomes of corporate-sponsored and personal volunteering. Across the first three studies, corporate volunteering is more strongly associated with favorable organizational outcomes than personal volunteering. Effects for personal outcomes are also generally stronger for corporate volunteering, although more nuanced across outcomes. At the organizational level, corporate volunteering is positively associated with retention. Together, the findings suggest that employer sponsorship is not merely a contextual detail, but an important feature of employee volunteering associated with different organizational and personal outcomes, offering both theoretical and practical implications for the design of corporate social impact initiatives and strategic use as organizational interventions.
