Taking a Functional Approach to Volunteering: Explaining Volunteer Congruence and Work Engagement

Using the functional approach to volunteering as a basis, I investigated the implications of volunteer motivation congruence (i.e., a match between motivations to volunteer and the satisfaction of those motivations) for work recovery and downstream work engagement. I focused on career and understanding-based volunteer motives and psychological detachment and mastery recovery experiences. This was evaluated using a cross-sectional survey with a sample (N = 119) of employees with past volunteering experience. I found that psychological detachment was higher when career motives were greater than career motive satisfaction. Agreement between motives and satisfaction for both career and understanding motivations was also found to be more important than disagreement for predicting mastery experiences. Neither recovery variable (detachment and mastery experiences) was found to predict work engagement. No hypothesized indirect effects of the work recovery variables on the relationship between volunteer congruence and work engagement were supported. Overall, the results show a novel pattern of findings that encourages future research on volunteer motivation congruence and recovery experiences.