The Role of Informal Control for Volunteer Satisfaction and Turnover in Volunteer Work Teams

Informal organizational control's role, while not extensively studied, has been said to be increasingly important - especially in contexts in which formal power, formal incentives and rewards are not prevalent - in volunteer teams. We are interested in how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can reduce volunteers' turnover by inducing an informal clan control in their organization. We propose that clan control positively influences both volunteer job satisfaction and satisfaction of relatedness of needs, argued to be important indicators of how likely these volunteers will remain engaged in the organization - and that these links are partly mediated by the induced behavior of volunteers in teams, specifically, the lateral monitoring, i.e. the informal peer control that results. We selected volunteers in a children's rights NGO with almost 3,000 volunteers in Germany to empirically test our model. This NGO organizes its volunteer work in 175 regional volunteer groups, each headed by a group leader. Test results of structural equation modeling provide evidence that direct and indirect peer control indeed act as partial mediators of clan control's link to satisfaction and thereby turnover intention in our sample of more than 600 volunteers. While direct peer control partly mediates clan control's link to job satisfaction and satisfaction of relatedness needs, indirect peer control partly mediates clan control's link to satisfaction of relatedness needs. Implications for NGOs building on volunteer work and future research are discussed.