Perceptions of Employee Volunteering: Is It “Credited” or “Stigmatized” by Colleagues?

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Abstract
As research begins to accumulate on employee volunteering, it appears that this behavior is largely beneficial to employee performance and commitment. It is less clear, however, how employee volunteering is perceived by others in the workplace. Do colleagues award volunteering “credit” (e.g., associating it with being concerned about others) or do they “stigmatize” it (e.g., associating it with being distracted from work)? Moreover, do those evaluations predict how colleagues actually treat employees who volunteer more often? Adopting a reputation perspective, we draw from theories of person perception and attribution to explore these research questions. The results of a field study reveal that colleagues gave credit to employee volunteering when they attributed it to intrinsic reasons and stigmatized employee volunteering when they attributed it to impression management reasons. Ultimately, through the awarded credits, volunteering was rewarded by supervisors (with the allocation of more resources) and coworkers (with the provision of more helping behavior) when it was attributed to intrinsic motives—a relationship that was amplified when stigmas were low and mitigated when stigmas were high. The results of a laboratory experiment further confirmed that volunteering was both credited and stigmatized, distinguishing it from citizenship behavior, which was credited but not stigmatized.

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