Understanding the Spread of Sustained Employee Volunteering: How Volunteers Influence Their Coworkers’ Moral Identity Work

Employee volunteering has become a common phenomenon in many organizations. However, it is unclear how sustained volunteering spreads between colleagues. Drawing on an empirical study set in the English legal profession, this study examines the processes through which existing employee volunteers influence their coworkers to internalize a volunteer identity. The study yields a theoretical model that specifies how coworkers may identify existing volunteers as moral exemplars. Five forms of social influence emanate, often unknowingly, from these exemplars: encouraging, evoking, edifying, enacting, and exemplifying. These forms of social influence inform coworkers’ microprocess of moral identity work through which they claim a volunteer identity. This study thereby shifts attention from the well-theorized outcomes of moral identities to the largely unexamined social influences on moral identities in the workplace, enriching our understanding of the development of the moral self that is foundational to theories of volunteering and identity.

What drives employee's involvement in corporate volunteering? Bright and dark side of consequences to organization

PurposeThis study assesses the relevance of both individual and contextual factors as an antecedent to employee participation in corporate volunteering (CV) activities and affective organizational commitment and inter-role conflict as an outcome of employee volunteering. This study draws from the functional theory of motivation, social exchange theory and role strain perspective to explain hypothesized relationship of the study constructs.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire survey was administered with 461 employee volunteers who had participated in company-sponsored volunteering programs. The authors adopted structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the study hypotheses.FindingsThe findings from the survey suggest that altruistic motives and organization CV capability will impact employee's participation in CV. The results highlight that employee participation in CV enhances affective organizational commitment, indicating that employee volunteering creates inter-role conflict.Research limitations/implicationsThough the study has identified inter-role conflict as a potentially unfavorable outcome, exploring when and how employee volunteering will create a negative effect will add significant value to organizations to protect the interest of their employees.Practical implicationsThis study provides insights to understand the relative effects of self- and other-oriented motives. The results suggest that organizations have more directed and carefully designed employee volunteering activities to enable more favorable benefits to employees.Originality/valueThis study contributes to expanding the knowledge on the phenomenon of employee volunteering by introducing and empirically validating an integrated framework of antecedents and consequences of employee volunteering.

Brillio Technologies and ‘Bringing Smiles’

Firms are under constant pressure to minimize negative externalities and increase positive externalities. These pressures are translating into the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities by firms. CSR is emerging as a widespread business activity, and firms are undertaking CSR voluntarily. This case provides a brief discussion of the scenario of CSR in India. It goes on to discuss the educational activities undertaken by firms under their CSR programmes. Brillio Technologies is one such company that has adopted CSR voluntarily, from the very first year of operations, in 2015. CSR actions of Brillio go beyond the legal requirements as it achieved remarkable results in community engagement and employee engagement. CSR activities of companies are internal to the organization, such as reducing and recycling waste, or external to the organization, such as reducing its carbon footprint. While Brillio undertook numerous internal activities, its focus was on external activities through its flagship programme ‘Bringing Smiles’. The programme successfully reached 100,000 underserved students through STEM education by 2020—the company partnered with NGOs and schools to achieve its social goals. Participants need to evaluate the existing programme and strategize for achieving the goals. They are posed with three choices: (a) increase employee volunteering hours, (b) partner with more NGOs and (c) recommend a foundation for taking up CSR activities. These strategies could be a huge drain on the resources, hence there is need for a cost-benefit analysis of the alternatives.

An Approach to Corporate Volunteering in Spain

This study aims to analyse the role of corporate volunteerism in the framework of corporate social responsibility of enterprises. After reviewing the active components in the employee volunteering concept, we present the steps taken at the European level in this area, focusing on Spain’s situation. We start with a search and comparison of information on the topic published by the major Spanish listed companies. This first approach verifies that the data are disclosed from various sources and presented heterogeneously. Then, we identify the sector that concentrates a more significant number of employees in volunteer activities. Subsequently, we focus on this sector to explore the type of volunteer activities these companies reveal according to Spanish legislation. The study sheds light on corporate governance practices, especially the disclosure of information about this activity type.

CORPORATE VOLUNTEERING IN THE CONTEXT OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

he volunteering essence and its types were considered in the article. Defined, the multidirectional structures and multifunctionality of volunteering allow us to confirm its economic, environment and social value is being increased. In this work was discovered the connection between country’s economic growth which basic evaluating ratio serves as the gross national income per capita and population proportion that participated in volunteer activities. The Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated using two investigated indicators by the instance of 12 Europe countries in 2019. We gained a next result: rxy= 0,9475 it demonstrates an essential impact of citizen volunteering on economic increment. The mathematical economic model had been developed to concretise the correlation between investigated indicators. In the article was defined close and direct dependency between the economic indicator and the proportion of participated volunteers: the more people were being involved in volunteering activities, the more GNI per capita was being increasd. We defined that corporate volunteering was the most crucial part of business social responsibility. There were analysed the realization of main corporate volunteering activities in Ukraine, which of them at the present stage are blood donation, parks cleaning, gardening, medical organisation financial assistanse, ATO fighters support, the care of cancer-affected children. Employee volunteering advantages for different social entities such as business, employees and communities were determined. Corporate volunteering practises enhance company image and provide their stable competitive market through the improvong process of employee loyalty, rising the quantity of external stakeholders’ positive responses about a company, the increasing level of employee ethical conduct, motivation, team spirit, and initiative.