Work and volunteering: longitudinal relationships between work-related experiences and volunteering behavior

This study examines the effect of work-related experiences on employees’ engagement in community volunteering, using data from a British longitudinal panel of employees. Using a novel analytical approach that separates variation in volunteering due to within-person changes in work conditions from variation due to between-person work differences, we more robustly test existing and new hypotheses about the effects of work on volunteering. New to this literature, we find that commuting and satisfaction with job experiences are significant predictors of community volunteering, both the likelihood to volunteer and volunteering frequency. In turn, volunteering determinants previously explored with cross-sectional data, such as managerial and professional jobs, employment sector and hourly-paid contracts are no longer statistically significant in the within-person models. We discuss a number of important theoretical and practical consequences of these findings.