Misfit in volunteering: How do volunteers perceive and deal with misfit?

• In Event: Retaining Volunteers

Abstract

Worldwide, millions of people spend time volunteering for nonprofit organizations (Snyder and Omoto 2008). They are a valuable resource contributing to achieving organizational goals (Brudney and Meijs 2009). With a wide variety of volunteering forms and types (Enjolras 2021), volunteers‘ perceived person-environment fit, i. e. their compatibility with their work environment, plays a major role to specifically adapt human resource practices to the management of volunteers. Reversely, since volunteers are perceived as unreliable (Scanlon et al. 2014), leaving the nonprofit organizations or reducing their volunteering hours (Nesbit et al. 2018), volunteer management needs to encompass potential challenges in the volunteer experience.
Thus far, research focused on positive fit experiences of volunteers (Englert et al. 2020). However, to gain a holistic understanding of volunteers’ organizational attitudes and behaviors, misfit as “the recognition of misalignment with one or more aspects of the environment” might be equally important (Englert et al., 2023). We exploratively assess (Bansal und Corley 2012; Schubert et al. 2023) volunteers’ misfit experiences to explore two main questions:
1) How do volunteers perceive person-environment misfits over time?
2) How do volunteers cope with this misfit?
Based on purposive sampling (Ritchie et al., 2014), we 53 interviews with volunteers (between the age of 16 and 85) in two waves (wave 1: n=20; wave 2: n=20) and follow-up interviews with wave 1 interviewees (n=13), to gain insights into their experiences with person-environment misfit situations and their responses to them. The interviews are transcribed and the content is analyzed with MAXQDA (Miles et al. 2014) using a three-step coding process (Saldaña, 2013).
Our research contribution is threefold: First we aim to enhance the holistic understanding of how volunteers perceive misfit within their workplace environment and how it affects their overall organizational experiences in the volunteering context. Second, we want to enrich research on volunteer management with insights on volunteers' attitudes and behaviors when dealing with misfit. Furthermore, our research provides a groundwork for implementing effective human resource practices in the context of volunteering, particularly in terms of retaining volunteers.
Our preliminary findings show that misfit is likely to occur within the established fit dimensions of volunteer-job, -organization, -supervisor, and -group. Furthermore, misfit can best be described as a journey. Accordingly, our research reveals that anticipated misfit tends to resolve itself over time as volunteers gain more experience and that many instances of anticipated misfit turn into fit, when volunteers retrospectively compare their past experiences. Additionally, we find that misfit tends to accumulate gradually over time rather than suddenly reaching a threshold, allowing the application of resolving strategies to be implemented over a longer period of time.

References

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Authors

• Lena Wolber

• Benedikt Englert, Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences

• Julia Thaler, University of the Bundeswehr Munich