The Effect of Volunteers on Paid Workers’ Excess Turnover in Nonprofit and Public Organizations

• Author: Benjamin Bittschi,Ulrike Schneider,Astrid Pennerstorfer
• DOI: 10.1177/0734371X17715503
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Date: 01 June 2019

https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X17715503

Review of Public Personnel Administration

2019, Vol. 39(2) 256 –275

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0734371X17715503

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Article

The Effect of Volunteers

on Paid Workers’ Excess

Turnover in Nonprofit and

Public Organizations

Benjamin Bittschi1, Astrid Pennerstorfer2,

and Ulrike Schneider2

Abstract

Volunteers in nonprofit and public organizations can provide additional resources and

exert positive influence on organizations, staff, and clients. However, the relationship

between paid staff and volunteers is complex and may lead to tension, employee

dissatisfaction, and, ultimately, workers leaving the organization. This article focuses

on excessive worker turnover as a signal of delicate organizational health and analyzes

whether volunteers are an important variable in explaining differences in excess

turnover rates between organizations. Using Austrian survey data and applying Tobit

regressions, we show that more volunteers in management tasks compared with

volunteers employed in other tasks increase both the probability of experiencing

excess worker turnover and the amount of excess turnover. This result is interpreted

as a possible sign for volunteer–staff tension. Understanding the consequences of

using volunteer labor for paid workers is important to prevent volunteering from

backfiring on service capacity and quality in public and nonprofit organizations.

Keywords

worker turnover, volunteers, volunteer–staff conflict, Austria, volunteer tasks

Introduction

The use of volunteers alongside paid employees is one of the main characteristics in many

nonprofit and public organizations. Volunteers provide additional resources to the

1Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

2WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria

Corresponding Author:

Astrid Pennerstorfer, Institute for Social Policy, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business,

Welthandelsplatz 1, Vienna 1020, Austria.

Email: astrid.pennerstorfer@wu.ac.at

715503ROPXXX10.1177/0734371X17715503Review of Public Personnel AdministrationBittschi et al.

research-article2017

Bittschi et al. 257

organization and can exert positive influence on organizations, staff, and even clients who

interact with them (e.g., Haski-Leventhal, Hustinx, & Handy, 2011; Hoogervorst, Metz,

Roza, & van Baren, 2016; Rogers, Jiang, Rogers, & Intindola, 2016). Their social net-

works and individual human resources interact with those of paid workers which likely

affects the development of more complex types of institutional capital as conceptualized

by Ployhart, Nyberg, Reilly, and Maltarich (2014). However, the relationship between

paid staff and volunteers is complex and can sometimes also lead to tension, employee

dissatisfaction, and, ultimately, workers leaving the organization (e.g., Kreutzer & Jäger,

2011; Rogelberg et al., 2010; Studer & von Schnurbein, 2013). In this case, combining

paid and unpaid work will not increase institutional capital by way of “interaction com-

plementarity” (Ployhart et al., 2014, p. 384), but could rather weaken it.

For organizations, turnover is sometimes inevitable and can even be desired up to a

certain degree, because some labor turnover can have a positive influence on perfor-

mance (see, for example, Meier & Hicklin, 2008). However, labor turnover can incur

high costs through recruiting and training new employees. Productivity may be tem-

porarily reduced until a vacant position is filled (Cho & Lewis, 2012). Excess turnover

clearly erodes or inhibits the development of organizational social capital (Andrews,

2017; Leana & van Buren, 1999). Finally, labor turnover presents a challenge to ser-

vice quality as many public and nonprofit services hinge on a stable personal relation-

ship between the client and employees of the service provider (Hayes et al., 2012).

To explain labor turnover, it is now acknowledged that different organizational

peculiarities, such as the supervisor’s gender (Grissom, Nicholson-Crotty, & Keiser,

2012), race (Grissom & Keiser, 2011), or the adoption of human resource management

practices (Cho & Lewis, 2012), are influential. However, one important feature of

many public and nonprofit services, namely, the involvement of volunteers, has not

received much attention yet. Also, existing literature that discusses volunteer–staff

relationships mainly presents results from qualitative research and case studies, most

probably because relationships and especially interpersonal conflicts are hard to grasp

in larger scale quantitative data.

Against this background, our article focuses on excessive worker turnover as an indi-

cation of fragile organizational health. The concept of excessive worker turnover high-

lights the amount of labor flows which are not connected to a change in the number of

jobs an organization saves or creates. It thus suggests that there is avoidable turnover. Our

study addresses the question whether volunteers are important to explain differences in

excess turnover rates between organizations. To our best knowledge, this is the first article

focusing on excess turnover in examining potential volunteer–staff conflict. The empiri-

cal analysis adopts a quantitative approach and builds on pooled organizational-level data

for Austrian public and nonprofit organizations gathered in 2006 and 2014.

The Association of Volunteers and Paid Workers’ Excess

Worker Flows (EWF)

This section explains the concept of excess worker turnover and presents deliberations

why volunteers should be considered in explaining variations of excess worker turnover.