Financial Rewards and Volunteer Motivation

In my book, "The Conscious Volunteer," I covered several topics that contribute to the development and excellence of volunteer organizations and teams. In this article, I want to highlight a management practice used by some volunteer and non-profit organizations: offering "financial rewards to volunteers" to motivate them to give and continue their volunteer work.

There's no doubt that a financial reward is an incentive for a volunteer, even though it contradicts the universally accepted definition of a volunteer, person who performs volunteer work without any material compensation. However, some volunteer organization managements may feel compelled to offer "financial rewards" to maintain the continuity of their volunteers' contributions, mistakenly believing that this incentive will play a major role in keeping them engaged.

Rewards are Necessary

Therefore, in this article, I wanted to present a summary of an excellent study conducted by researchers Goette and Frey in 1999 on the effect of "financial rewards" on volunteers. The study's sample was a volunteer organization in Switzerland, and the researchers compared the performance of volunteers when they received no material compensation with their performance after they began receiving regular financial rewards.

The study's results showed that the performance of the volunteers who received financial rewards was negatively affected compared to when they were doing the work without any material compensation. The study also noted that the average number of hours worked by a volunteer decreased by approximately four hours compared to before the rewards were given.

Financial Rewards

Studies like this make us realize that offering a material incentive to volunteers may not be an effective way to motivate them and enable them to achieve the organization's mission in the community. If a volunteer or non-profit organization decides to offer regular "financial rewards" to volunteers, they should treat them as full-time or part-time paid employees, with clear work contracts that include rights, duties, and required job tasks. This will help avoid the negative repercussions of such financial rewards on the volunteer organization's work environment.

The topic of "motivating volunteers" is closely tied to the extent of satisfaction the volunteer feels from joining the volunteer work through the team or organization, or, in other words, to what extent the organization has satisfied the need that drove the volunteer to join.

Several Negative Effects

There are several negative effects from extensively offering rewards to volunteers. I'll mention the following:

• A decline in the organization's capacity to deal with and attract volunteers. This causes the organization to lose a fundamental human resource that contributes to achieving its mission in the community.
• The limited financial resources of volunteer and non-profit organizations conflict with extensively offering financial rewards. This can result in a lack of liquidity or the misuse of funds.
• Offering rewards indirectly affects several aspects, including a reduced focus on motivating volunteers and attracting new ones, a change in motivations, and a clear reflection of this in the organization's work environment and culture. It also leads to less investment, focus, and attention on coordinating between work units, volunteers, and paid employees, as the easiest solution for performing a task becomes hiring and giving a reward for the required tasks to be completed.

In conclusion, while preparing my doctoral dissertation on "Administrative Practices and Their Effect on Volunteer Motivation, Satisfaction, and Retention in the Organization for the Longest Period," I was struck by a valuable piece of information. It was a recommendation from a scientific conference held in Switzerland on volunteer topics. The information was: "Expanding the activities and scope of a volunteer or non-profit organization requires focusing and investing in coordination, and giving it the highest priority, if the organization wants to maintain its brilliance and success in performing its mission."
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