El voluntariado corporativoestrategias de implementación efectivas desde el estudio de los determinantes y barreras a la participación de los empleados

Resumo

Corporate Volunteering (CV) is a developing phenomenon that allows company, employees and society to gain -or to have different benefits-. This circumstance collides with the fact that employee participation is low because the corporate philanthropy reasons have not been comprehensively covered. Above all, there is a lack of research regarding the determinants and barriers of CV, and without clarifying this, it will not be as easy to increase the number of volunteers. Definitely, it is widely believed that even though CV programs have more importance now, empirical research is still very little and remains unknown. As such, our research strives to find out how the will to cooperate in CV works with the intention of increasing it, or likewise, how we can increase employee participation in CV programs. For this reason, we need to know which are the determinants and motivations of employees to participate in CV, and which are the barriers and obstacles that block or hinder such participation. For this purpose we have studied the current participants and in addition those who do not participate in CV actions. For the holistic understanding of the problem this research has been designed from a qualitative approach, widely used in social sciences because it creates diversity and difference. In addition it also allows us to study attitudes, opinions and practices of subjects in contexts –such as employees in Corporate Volunteering-, and thus to gain a better understanding of drivers, brakes and strategies to participation in CV. When participating in a voluntary activity, people can have multiple reasons which can affect their decision. In addition, the desire to help others prevails less in CV than in other forms of private volunteering. In relation to private volunteering, the main barrier for volunteers deciding not to remain in the long-term with the NGO is because they feel high levels of pressure and control. Moreover, key factors that differentiate CV from public volunteering are employer-employee intermediation and attitudes towards the employer, such as the motivation to impress managers, or being a good member of the company. In more details, lack of managerial support is one of the main barriers to employee participation in CV because it holds back the cross-cutting implementation of the project in order to reach all employees of the company. To achieve greater participation it is necessary firstly that the CEO figure drives and champions CV programs, and secondly managers facilitate this participation. Therefore, barriers to participation in CV can be similar -but with their own particularities and possibly assuming different levels of overcoming difficulty- to barriers to employee participation in other company projects; except for some exceptions derived from the own CV concept. Our results conclude that the company must promote or align their CV strategies with those motivations and factors that are determinant for employee participation; they must be able to reduce the barriers and brakes that make such participation impossible. Along these lines, the proposed model allows us to advance in the knowledge of the Corporate Volunteering field -as required in CV literature- at the same as offering companies managers a simple framework. With this framework they can then implement Volunteering Programs mitigating possible risks, and effectively increasing employee participation.