“An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth” in NPOs

Motivational aspects of volunteering in non-profit organizations (NPOs) has increasingly received attention from the academic debate, mainly focusing on attitudinal and behavioral mechanisms. One of this investigated mechanisms in socio-organizational contexts is reciprocity, according to which individuals feel obligated to reciprocate whenever they receive benefits from others, especially true in the context of NPOs. However, pertinent literature has mostly focused on volunteers’ positive reciprocity and the resulting prosocial behavior, but largely neglected the possible role of negative reciprocity, so the tendency to retaliate in case of mistreatments. Building on the motivational functions theory, this paper proposes a conceptual model unpacking the underlying mechanisms between volunteers’ motives and their intention to stay with NPOs. Specifically, other-oriented motives and self-oriented motives are considered as the main antecedents of volunteers’ intention to stay. Moreover, both positive and negative reciprocity are hypothesized as mediating variables of such a relationship. The model is empirically tested using covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) on a sample of 379 volunteers operating in NPOs located in Italy. Positive reciprocity partially mediated both relationships between volunteers’ other-oriented motives and self-oriented motives and their intention to stay. Instead, negative reciprocity fully mediated the relationship between self-oriented motives and intention to stay, but not the relationship between other-oriented motives and intention to stay. This indicates that managers of NPOs should encourage within-organization positive reciprocal attitudes and discourage negative reciprocal attitudes to reduce volunteers’ turnover.