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theses

Volunteer labor – work performed for no remuneration – represents a sizable amount of labor power generated for nonprofit, public, and private organizations in the United States. Despite the tens of millions of men and women who donate their work to employers year in and year out, and despite the billions of dollars these unpaid workers save their employers in wage expenses annually, volunteers have received scant coverage in management and organizational scholarship. As a result, many of the fundamental aspects of work that have been studied concerning paid workers remain empirically unproven for volunteers. This study represents an attempt to bring the academic study of volunteers into the mainstream of industrial relations, human resource management, and organizational behavior scholarship. Using literature and theory from several disciplines, and utilizing the case of paid and unpaid college student interns, the pay status of work is analyzed in terms of its relationship to job design, job satisfaction, and career development. For a range of reasons predicated upon theoretical and empirical positions from the management, volunteerism, and vocational development literatures, it was predicted that non-wage jobs would possess lower levels of work structure in terms of a job’s task, knowledge, social, and contextual-related characteristics, and that unpaid workers would be less satisfied with, and report fewer career development benefits from, their work than would paid work and workers. A series of statistical analyses performed on data collected from 168 college interns partly supported the hypotheses put forth in this study. Volunteer interns indeed reported experiencing lower levels of knowledge and social characteristics than did their paid counterparts. However, no differences were found to exist between paid and unpaid workers on task and contextual dimensions of work. Additionally, paid and unpaid interns reported similar levels of satisfaction, as well as career development benefits, from their work experience. This study shed new light on a workforce that has existed in America since its earliest years, but that has been largely overlooked by workplace scholars. Its findings, and the discussion and debate it hopefully prompts, stand to benefit employers, communities and societies, and most importantly, the volunteer workforce itself.

ETD_4969

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Sean Edmund Rogers

doi:10.7282/T3SX6B73

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.