A literature review and development of a theoretical model for understanding commitment experienced by volunteers over the life of a project

Employee commitment to an organisation is accepted as an important concept in organisation psychology. Yet commitment to a project on which an employee might be working is largely unknown. Additional complications arise when the project makes use of volunteers who donate their time for reasons other than pecuniary reward. The relationships between volunteers, organisations and projects represent a gap in the field of organisational commitment knowledge. This paper identifies from literature the values that inform and influence volunteer commitment levels. Known antecedents of commitment are developed to present a model which encapsulates the variables that should be recognised as influencing volunteer commitment levels within a project context. The paper proposes a conceptual model of volunteer commitment to a project using three categories of commitment: emotional, purposeful and contextual, and concludes that the next phase of the study will test this model and develop a tool that will enable the measurement of volunteer commitment in a project context.