The Psychological Contract of Volunteers: A New Research Agenda

This paper considers the ways in which research into the psychological contract of volunteers have been constrained by the direct transfer of measures from the study of employees, and more generally by the assumptions in the dominant psychological contract discourse. After examining these assumptions the paper proposes a revised research agenda, open to the possibility that the psychological contract of volunteers is affected by expectations arising from socio-cultural influences beyond the volunteer/manager relationships, and in particular, from the expectations of relative freedom in volunteering and from subjective perceptions of volunteering as (variously) serious leisure, unpaid work, or activism. Understanding the contract as socially constructed reveals the need to juxtapose the expectations of managers and volunteers in order to understand the contract as a social relationship.