Trust, Justice And Satisfaction In Volunteering Within Non-Profit-Organizations. The Mediating Role Of Trust: An Organizational Psychological Perspective

• In Event: Trust in philanthropy and fundraising

Abstract

People volunteering within NPOs often are confronted with uncertainty. This can be either because the mission of the NPO involves helping people within a crisis, such as refugee aid (Kals, Thiel, & Roithmaier, 2017), or because the NPO itself is going through changes.
Fairness Heuristic Theory (Lind, 2001) is interested in situations within which people have to cope with uncertainty. The theory assumes that people within socially uncertain situations use justice-related cues as a heuristic. Fairnes judgements thereby serve as relationship heuristics, whether one can trust others. Justice and trust therefore have been proven to be important within times of crisis and uncertainty (van den Bos, 2001)

Trust has been the aim of lots of research within For-Profit-Organizations (Dirks & Ferrin, 2022). Trust can either refer to an individual, like a supervisor (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002), or to a workgroup. (Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012).
Trust itself has been linked to different outcomes, relevant to organizations such as job satisfaction (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002). Different types of trust have been shown to be significant mediators, mediating the relationship between perceptions of justice and work outcomes, such as satisfaction within the public sector (Aryee, Budhwar, & Chen, 2002) and For-profit-Organizations (Colquitt et al., 2012).

Unlike studies in the profit sector, one study looking at volunteers indicates that trust does not make a significant contribution to explain satisfaction (Dal Corso et al., 2019).
Although the organizational framework of volunteering has increasingly become the focus of research and perceptions of justice have proven to be important for volunteering (Xu, & Zhang, 2023), research on the role of trust and its impact on work attitudes is mostly still missing within the volunteer context.
For volunteering the significance of relatedness needs has shown to be of great importance predicting job satisfaction (Boezemann & Ellemers, 2009).

This finding sheds light on the importance of the group of other volunteers. Therefore the scope of relatedness has to be considered when studying trust within volunteering. Besides trust in the supervisor, trust in other volunteers is expected to be important within volunteer work.

What types of trust are significant for volunteers? What correlations exist with other variables, such as satisfaction and the experience of justice? Do different types of trust mediate the impact of justice perceptions on satisfaction?
These questions were investigated in a questionnaire study with volunteers (N = 194) working within different volunteer organizations.
Analogous to previous research on trust in For-Profit-Organizations, two types of trust can be differentiated: Trust in the supervisor and trust in other volunteers. Both types of trust show significant correlations with the experience of justice as well as satisfaction. Data shows that both trust in the supervisor and trust in other volunteers partial mediate the effect of general justice perceptions on satisfaction.
Having shown the importance of trust, an interview study is conducted to take a closer look at trust within volunteering and especially the role of leadership through the supervisor.

The importance of the findings for volunteer management is discussed.

References

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Dal Corso, L., Carluccio, F., Buonomo I., Benevene, P., Vecina, M. L., & West, M. (2019). " I that is we, that is I": The Mediating role of work engagement between key leadership behaviors and volunteer satisfaction. TPM: Testing, Psychometrics, Methodology in Applied Psychology, 26(4).

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Xu, Y., & Zhang, Y. (2023). Institutional trust and prosocial behavior in China: an experimental approach. The Journal of Social Psychology, 163(1), 79-93.

Authors

• Kathrin Thiel, Internationale Hochschule Liebenzell

• Sarina Kiessling