INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS THAT PROMOTE MOTIVATION, SATISFACTION AND PERMANENCE IN NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS

Within the field of Community Psychology, studies focusing on prosocial behaviors, voluntary service and Voluntary Organizations are increasing. Many of these studies concern the individual characteristics (i.e. prosocial personality) that promote the subjective intention to do voluntary service. However, in order to encourage the intention to remain in an organization and to ensure organizational well-being, a new perspective is needed to analyze how organizational factors affect individual motivation and satisfaction of volunteers. According to the Self Determination Theory, claim that volunteer satisfaction is connected to the significance of the activity and to individual autonomous motivation. On the other hand, in the Role Identity Model of volunteers, make a distinction between Specific Role Identity and General Volunteer Role Identity. Our investigation concerns the way in which individual and organizational factors intertwine in order to sustain permanence, satisfaction and motivation in members of Voluntary Organizations. The present contribution regards research that has been conducted in the last two years. Using a quali-quantitative method, we collected opinions, attitudes and narratives from about 400 volunteers belonging to eight different Voluntary Organizations. In particular, individual factors (such as motivation to volunteer and volunteer satisfaction) and organizational factors (such as organizational climate and commitment and job characteristics) were investigated through self-report questionnaires and then further analyzed by means of 35 interviews and 8 focus groups. Overall, results showed that autonomous motivation, which was confirmed as crucial to the initial decision to volunteer, was not significant in terms of sustaining the intention to remain in the organization. On the contrary, the perception of positive relationships within the organization (among volunteers and between volunteers and board members), as well as high organizational commitment, favored volunteer satisfaction and reduced any intention to leave. Interestingly, job characteristics also had little influence on satisfaction. Qualitative data from interviews and focus groups largely confirm this and suggested that volunteers maintain their commitment due to: a) the volunteer identity becoming central to individual self-definition; b) the positive and "specific" image of their Voluntary Organization; c) awareness of the direct consequences of their action on beneficiaries and d) sharing of the normative system of the Organization they belong to. To sum up, individual motivation represents an extremely important factor in the initial stages of creation of volunteer identity while context-specific organizational factors proved to be essential in sustaining volunteer satisfaction and participation. Generally, data suggest that it is very important to pay attention to organizational factors if we want to promote the well-being of members and beneficiaries within the world of NonProfit Organizations.