Job attitude and motivation differences between volunteers and employees from comparable organizations.

Data were collected from members of 8 organizations: volunteer- and employee-staffed newspapers, poverty relief agencies, family planning clinics, and fire departments. It was expected that volunteers would report greater intrinsic, social, and service motivation; greater job satisfaction; less intent to leave; it was also expected that their activities would be more praiseworthy than that of employees. ANOVAs confirmed the expectation for all variables except intrinsic motivation. Results are consistent with "sufficiency-of-justification" effects. Limitations of the present study and implications of the intrinsic-motivation exception for generalizations of laboratory findings to the workplace are discussed. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).