Employee and Volunteer

• Author: José Luis Roldán‐Salgueiro,Antonio Ariza‐Montes,Antonio Leal‐Rodríguez
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21121
• Date: 01 March 2015
• Published date: 01 March 2015

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N M  L, vol. 25, no. 3, Spring 2015 © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21121

Journal sponsored by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

Correspondence to: Antonio Ariza-Montes, Universidad Loyola Andalucía Escritor Castilla Aguayo, 4, 14004, Córdoba,

Spain. E-mail: ariza@uloyola.es.

Employee and Volunteer

AN UNLIKELY COCKTAIL?

Antonio Ariza-Montes,1 José Luis Roldán-Salgueiro,2

Antonio Leal-Rodríguez1

1Universidad Loyola Andalucía, 2Universidad de Sevilla

The purpose of this research is to analyze the different factors that determine the level of

time devoted to volunteer activity involving employed people. To this end, we applied a

logistic regression model to a sample of 5,067 employees, considering four categories of

factors: family and personal, on the one hand, and contextual factors, on the other. This

second group involves three factor categories: occupational, organizational, and community

involvement factors. The findings of this work are especially relevant to two areas: first, to

design a policy of corporate social responsibility that effectively integrates the figure of cor-

porate volunteering, considering its pertinent factors; and second, to broaden the perspec-

tive of the third-sector organizations beyond the traditional profile with which volunteers

are commonly associated.

Keywords: volunteering, third sector, corporate volunteering, corporate social responsibil-

ity, labor conditions

Employee and Volunteer?

The volunteer labor force has been considered to be concentrated on unemployed indi-

viduals—youth, women, or retired people—who have plenty of spare time available (Wilson

2000). However, the notion of voluntary activity has gradually evolved over recent decades;

contemplating the idea that an employee could donate part of his or her time to perform

volunteer work—given that remunerative work implies a significant restriction or that a

company could establish a program to channel these specifi c social sensitivities—was highly

unlikely during the twentieth century. Nowadays, working is conceived as a mechanism of

social integration that contributes to develop civic skills, among which may be obviously

included those intended to benefi t the company without any retribution.1

 ese and other reasons justify that, for many organizations, certain initiatives of individual

and collective solidarity—promoted by the employees themselves—have been translated into

culturally accepted habits, becoming programs that formally channel and foster the voluntary

activity as an initiative of the organization.  e growing demand in society for greater levels

of corporate social responsibility—at an external level—and expectations of personal growth