A conceptual approach to sport volunteerism
Part of : Χορηγία ; Vol.1, No.1, 2005, pages 7-24
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7-24
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The increasing needs of human labor in conjunction with the limited resources available drive several voluntary organizations to recruit more and more volunteer workers to complement or even enrich their services to the society. The growing use of volunteer labor in different facets of everyday life created a compelling need for all these people who were involved with human service agencies to review and re-evaluate the existing knowledge regarding volunteer activity. Understanding what motivates people to offer free assistance is important because agencies would be able to use this knowledge to appeal more persuasively to potential volunteers. Volunteers today are a very important element of leisure, recreation and sports. Staging big athletic events, such the Olympic Games, would not be feasible, without the use of a large amount of sport volunteers. However, research on volunteerism in sports is based largely on concepts and measures derived from studies of volunteers in non-sport industries. An extensive literature review revealed that the knowledge regarding the internal structure of motivation to volunteer remains limited. The literature review revealed a lot of methodological weaknesses in the way that research about volunteer motivation has been conducted. These weaknesses, in addition to the fact that the conceptual frameworks, that have been proposed so far, do not take under consideration all aspects of volunteerism in sport settings, create a compelling need for additional research, and approach of this phenomenon from a different angle. For the purposes of this paper, six typologies of incentive systems have been discussed with the belief that they describe better volunteerism in sport. The proposed theories seem to cover a great deal of the unique aspects and needs of sport volunteers. However, only after the analysis of empirical data will be safe to draw conclusions about the conceptual basis and the internal structure of volunteerism in sport.
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