Reconciling “Third Space/Place”

The Third Place Value/Priority Assigned to Volunteering

Scholarly use and debate of third place as a fitting term to characterize volunteer roles underscores the ambiguous value and priority afforded to volunteering in research and practice. Ashforth and his colleagues (2000) in management first employed the term to characterize sundry voluntary affiliations, “other social domains, such as church, health club, and neighborhood bar,” that fall outside of the first two realms of work and home (p. 473). Kramer (2002) subsequently argued that Ashforth et al.’s third place designation wrongly “suggest[ed] these various groups are less important or unimportant” and betrayed “a managerial bias” (p. 168) that does not accurately reflect the importance of volunteering in society and individuals’ lives. While Kramer made a cogent point concerning the pejorative implications of discursively framing volunteering in this way, scholarly research has still presented a mixed picture of the value and priority afforded to volunteering by organizations and volunteers themselves. On one hand, some studies have demonstrated that individuals highly and self-sacrificially prioritize their volunteer commitments, viewing their relationships with and contributions to their volunteer organizations with great importance (e.g., Iverson, 2013; Maugh, 2013; Thornton & Novak, 2010). On the other hand, in presenting his model for the socialization of voluntary members, Kramer (2011) posited that multiple memberships in various organizational, family, and other social contexts also vie for volunteers’ attentions and therefore impact the degree to which they prioritize their volunteer commitments.

This mixed value and priority assigned to volunteering is further evident in the ambiguous practices of organizations, not just volunteers. For example, one might contend that the increasing professionalization of volunteering suggests that organizational leaders highly value volunteers and, in fact, construct their roles as similar to paid work commitments (see Ganesh & McAllum, 2012; Sanders, 2012). Then again, a different interpretation of volunteer professionalization could also be that restricting these roles according to “monitoring and reporting requirements, legal prescriptions, and management trends” is evidence of an employment-centered managerial bias that devalues volunteer membership (Ganesh & McAllum, 2012, p. 154); as such, those who hold this managerial bias may assume that volunteers will fail to prioritize their volunteer commitments and/or pursue them responsibly and, thus, must be tightly monitored through professionalized practices (cf. Onyx, 2013). The related notion of third space further illuminates this complex assemblage of volunteer and other life commitments by highlighting the spatiotemporal nuances of this type of membership.

The Third Space Where Volunteering Is Enacted

Ashcraft and Kedrowicz (2002) emphasized that volunteer membership contracts are enacted in a tenuous third space that often differs from the spatiotemporal dynamics of paid organizational staff. The authors pointed out that volunteers typically lack a designated organizational area for their activities and accomplish their work in various locales and times often removed from their supervisors and fellow members. By extension, the place and time designated for volunteering is often intermingled with other spaces (both literally and figuratively) of a volunteer’s life. This notion of third space resonates with Kramer’s (2011) conceptualization of volunteers’ “simultaneous and overlapping memberships” and acknowledgment that the “container metaphor does not appropriately represent organizational boundaries for many voluntary memberships” (p. 250).

These spatiotemporal dimensions of volunteering illuminate several complexities for managerial communication. First, such dynamics make it difficult to determine whether an individual is actually a current or former volunteer. This idea of ambiguous membership status was illustrated, for example, in Garner and Garner’s (2010) survey-based study, which found that dissatisfied volunteers may be apt to neglect their duties yet remain members of their organizations. Second, as was alluded to in Onyx’s (2013) recent examination of volunteer deviance, the idea of third space suggests that it is difficult to ensure that volunteers act in accordance with organizational preferences and guidelines. Third, it highlights the fact that volunteer activities and identifications are often interspersed with one’s other activities and identifications, and this intermingling may be harmonious or contentious depending upon the individual and circumstances. For example, Cruz’s (2013) exposition of the paradox of volunteer involvement depicted the problematic mixing of these worlds, whereas Gilstrap and White’s (2013) study of hospice volunteers demonstrated the complementary overlap of multiple roles such as volunteer and friend.

Summary and Tie to Managerial Communication

As the aforementioned scholarship suggests, the third place importance and priority assigned to volunteering is contested by volunteers, organizations, and scholars alike. In addition, the third space where volunteer membership is enacted problematizes organizations’ abilities to assess whether volunteers act in accordance with organizational expectations and discern whether they are even current volunteers at all. Likewise, it engenders ambiguous boundaries between volunteer and other roles/identities. Not surprisingly, volunteers’ complex positioning is reported to incite any number of unfavorable experiences for volunteers ranging from role uncertainty and uncomfortable interactions to burnout and other negative psychological and emotional outcomes (Ashcraft & Kedrowicz, 2002; Douglas & Kim, 2013; Kramer et al., 2013).

Given the uncertain place that volunteer membership holds in our lives and the nebulous space in which it is enacted, managers face a precarious yet highly consequential task in directing and appraising volunteers, negotiating their role responsibilities, and determining the scope and nature of their organizational involvement. For example, in light of the separation that often characterizes volunteer membership experiences, it may appear that managers should seek ways to promote greater volunteer involvement: Iverson’s (2013) recent comparison of a volunteer organization that fostered involvement with one that did not lends credibility to this position. However, Cruz’s (2013) work suggested that increased involvement may also induce stress for volunteers. In addition, Adams, Schlueter, and Barge (1988) found that volunteers are similarly satisfied with less versus more participative forms of organizational decision-making, and Ashcraft and Kedrowicz’s (2002) ethnographic work actually revealed that some volunteers viewed reduced responsibilities favorably. Thus, though it is clear that volunteers exemplify a contested and ambiguously defined positionality in nonprofit and voluntary organizations (NPVOs), our current understandings of how this reality translates to constructive communication practices in volunteer management is not as clear. Thus, we pursued the research question: What dynamics are at play in volunteer–manager communication?

Participants and Data

Purposive sampling extended to three types of nonprofit organizations throughout the Southern and Midwest regions of the United States: (a) eight volunteer fire departments, collectively referred to as Volunteer Fire Rescue (VFR), (b) two regional programs of Child Watchdogs, a national agency serving abused children, and (c) two regional programs of Teen Ministry, a national faith-based outreach program for teenagers (pseudonyms). Participants were initially recruited from four sites with granted access to their staff and volunteers (one VFR, two Child Watchdogs, and one Teen Ministry); these participants subsequently referred us to individuals in additional units and programs. Ultimately, 64 volunteers and 12 supervisors (6 paid and 6 unpaid) took part in the study (20 firefighters, 35 child advocates, and 21 youth outreach workers). Individual interviews and focus groups yielded approximately 83 hours of audio-recorded data that were transcribed.

Semistructured interviews were conducted with 54 participants: 14 VFR members (3 supervisors, 11 volunteers), 27 Child Watchdogs members (3 supervisors, 24 volunteers), and 13 Teen Ministry members (4 supervisors, 9 volunteers). To elicit focused yet nuanced insight into participants’ experiences, we began with “grand tour questions” regarding participants’ lived experiences (e.g., socialization processes, organizational structure, and role expectations; Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). We then asked probing questions to further elucidate the emerging themes and patterns of tension arising in the data (e.g., How do you know what’s expected of you? Describe your ideal relationship with your supervisor/volunteer—does this ideal match reality?). In addition, we conducted six focus groups with 22 participants using a modified version of the individual interview schedule: one with Teen Ministry volunteers, one with Child Watchdogs staff, two with Child Watchdogs volunteers, and two with volunteer firefighters.

We further informed our analysis by observing activities in the partnering organizations. Being a volunteer in the southern Child Watchdogs agency, the first author embodied a “complete membership role” yet made her researcher status known while observing the organization’s 30-hour volunteer training class and annual statewide convention (Adler & Adler, 1998). She also participated in several Teen Ministry events but in an explicit observer role without organizational membership. The second author adopted an observer role as well, by attending meetings of a Midwestern VFR unit and Child Watchdogs agency.

Analytic Processes

We engaged in a grounded, constant comparative analysis of the data from a constructivist perspective that “emphasizes how data, analysis, and methodological strategies become constructed, and takes into account the research context and researchers’ positions, perspectives, priorities, and interactions” (Bryant & Charmaz, 2007, p. 10; see also Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). As an integral part of this process, we generated memos which were often created when sharing our individual research experiences and interpretations of the data. These memos helped to develop categories and properties of the emerging codes and assess theoretical saturation. Organization, sharing, and analysis of data were facilitated using NVivo software. Our independent and collective iterations of analysis are summarized next.

After separately engaging in initial open-coding of data for several weeks, we met to compare and synthesize emergent coding schemes and identified seven constructs and issues emerging from the data (e.g., identity/identification, outreach/recruiting concerns, contested views of mission and roles). Following further weeks of research, “unexpected ideas emerge[d],” and we began to recognize eight persistent tensions in the volunteer–manager dynamic (e.g., ideal volunteer vs. willing volunteer, realism vs. romance in volunteer recruitment; Charmaz, 2006, p. 59). We then focused our data collection in accordance with theoretical sampling techniques (Morse, 2007) and began examining the literature on interpersonal (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996; Bridge & Baxter, 1992; Rawlins, 1992), group (Kramer, 2004), and nonprofit dialectics (Ganesh & McAllum, 2012; Sanders, 2012).

While immersed in the literature, we progressed to what Charmaz (2006) called focused coding to make determinations “about which codes make the most analytic sense to categorize your data incisively and completely” by individually “mov[ing] across interviews and observations and compar[ing] people’s experiences, actions, and interpretations” (pp. 58-59). After this, we determined that the tensions identified were indeed dialectical, or inextricably, indelibly bound in nature; consequently, we adopted what scholars have called a tension-centered approach to inquiry, which entertains “how to live with tension, not merely how to eliminate it” (Trethewey & Ashcraft, 2004, p. 84). Tracy (2004) characterized this more constructive, enabling view of tensions as complementary dialectics capable of being neutralized, balanced, or reframed. ¹

Hence, the first author engaged in an exhaustive analysis, comparing data sources, categories, and concepts with one another, to ensure that our interpretations exemplified Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) concepts of fit (relevance of categories to data) and work (the categories’ ability to explain the behavior studied). In doing so, for example, she found that barring few exceptions, which are addressed in the findings and discussion, the tensions experienced did not differ based on whether the supervisor participating in the study (or the supervisor referenced by a volunteer participant) was paid. The second author then engaged in negative case analysis, questioning the overlapping nature of the three broad complementary dialectics (previously called idealism, integration, and identity) and six subcategories established by the first author during the constant comparative process. As a result, the categories were refocused into four complementary dialectics that more clearly represented our findings.

Attraction-Adjustment

Early in the nebulous space of volunteer membership, NPVO leaders have opportunities to communicate with prospective and new volunteers and, as with socialization to other organizational memberships, these messages have the capacity to draw individuals to the organization and prepare them for their roles. In our research, however, we uncovered a dialectical tension in attempting to satisfy goals of attracting while adjusting volunteers through these early messages. Often, volunteer participants made sense of this dialectic as a contradiction. Notably, they perceived that attraction was solely promoted with messages about the positive benefits of volunteering while adjustment required negative messages about its frustrating, mundane, tedious, or even traumatic realities. So, while it may be true that realistic anticipatory messages help diminish the uncertainty endemic to volunteer membership and protect newcomers from the detrimental effects of shock and surprise cited in recent research (e.g., Cruz, 2013; Douglas & Kim, 2013), volunteers often understood these adjustment-facilitating messages as incongruous with those intended to attract and draw in new volunteers.

This became evident when participants discussed how they were drawn to their particular organizations. For example, Child Watchdogs volunteers mentioned reading newspaper recruitment ads about “making a difference in a child’s life.” Likewise, volunteer firefighters said that they heard about “the rush of running into burning buildings” from other firefighters, and Teen Ministry volunteers said that friends who were current volunteers persuaded them that, by becoming a volunteer, they would “do something that really mattered.” When subsequently asked about whether it was useful to disclose potentially negative information to prospective and new volunteers, many labeled such messages as “risky” or “counterproductive” and some even confessed that they perhaps would not have volunteered if they had fully grasped the “real” dimensions of their role before joining. For example, one Child Watchdogs volunteer admitted, “Some of the things I wish that I’d known would have made me not be a Child Watchdog” but then conceded, “I’ve gotten a lot of fulfillment out of it, so maybe it’s better I didn’t know . . . I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

Given this complexity, how might managers envision recruitment messages as capable of satisfying both needs to attract and realistically orient volunteers to their roles? Unfortunately, most Child Watchdogs managers also held a less constructive, contradictory view of this dialectic by focusing on, first, attracting new members with positive messages and then, later, adjusting them to the more negative realities of volunteering. For example, when asked why the organization struggled to attract volunteers, a Child Watchdogs supervisor concluded that their recruitment messages were not “catchy” enough: “We need better advertising with the brand . . . a bigger, better advertising campaign . . . something that’s catchy.” On further probing about this position, the supervisor went on to explain that the recruitment messages “must” be positive and training sessions must be upbeat and energetic. Then, when asked about volunteer attrition, some of that participant’s fellow colleagues admitted that negative realities of the Child Watchdogs experience repelled some volunteers. Still, they insisted: “It’s a gamble to reveal this stuff early on,” and “we worry about getting them ready for the bad stuff later.”

VFR chiefs did not perceive negative messages about group membership to be quite as contradictory to volunteer attraction as Child Watchdogs supervisors; even so, most chiefs acknowledged that having “boring” days (e.g., calls without fires, downtime at the firehouse) was an unattractive reality of the role and that “we don’t advertise that part of the gig” to prospective firefighters and trainees. This contradictory view of communication during volunteer recruitment, training, and orientation, then, does not resolve the problem of newcomer dropout after encountering negative realities. Nonetheless, our participants, like many volunteers, offered their time while juggling multiple organizational and life commitments; and unlike paid employees, who may take on and persist in negative experiences for the sake of pay, they had no financial remuneration. Thus, it was somewhat unsurprising that many managers perceived attraction and adjustment as contradictory rather than compatible goals. One notable exception was the Teen Ministry director who espoused a highly complementary view, which is expounded on later.

Ownership-Oversight

As with many superior–subordinate relationships, much of the communication between volunteers and their managers centers on ways volunteers carry out their activities and the manager’s place in directing this, or the negotiation of subordinate ownership and managerial oversight. In traditional employment settings, the dialectical pull between ownership and oversight concerns may be less prominent given that these terms are often set forth prior to employment (e.g., application/interview processes), that is, employers can screen for applicants who are amenable to such terms, and subordinates may quit or be terminated if they deviate from these terms at any point. Furthermore, employees and supervisors often interact regularly in close proximity, thus facilitating ease of oversight while still enabling subordinate autonomy.

However, the dynamics of volunteer–manager interaction present unique complexities. The organizations we studied desperately needed volunteers and were not prone to reject applicants or terminate existing ones except in cases of significant legal or ethical misconduct (e.g., a Child Watchdog failing a criminal background check; a Teen Ministry volunteer lying about violating the organization’s drinking policy). Also, many volunteers had limited direct contact with their supervisors. These realities fostered an ever present push–pull between volunteer freedom and managerial control. Volunteers reportedly desired a sense of self-efficacy and value and perceived this as being facilitated by ownership over one’s role; at the same time, supervisors also desired some degree of oversight due to a sense of responsibility for their subordinates. But as is consistent with previous research (e.g., Kramer, 2011), the terms of managerial supervision were rarely defined before volunteering.

Thus, many volunteers we interviewed perceived managerial oversight as inhibiting their sense of value and abilities in various ways. For several volunteers, limited ownership was perceived as a reflection of managerial distrust. Along these lines, a Teen Ministry volunteer who was disappointed with her current level of autonomy spoke about one team leader who “does a phenomenal job [but] . . . she takes on a lot of responsibility for herself, and she really needs to start trusting in the younger [volunteer] leaders.” Similarly, managerial oversight was interpreted by other volunteers as assailing their competencies—like one Child Watchdogs volunteer who said,

I found [my manager] to be very condescending. He’d talk down to me, say things like, “Now you know I want this on a certain date, and I don’t want you to tell me that you did it between 9/1 and 9/4 . . . ,” so much so that I would not have him as a supervisor again.

From the managers’ perspectives, they recognized the need to afford volunteers freedom but also questioned whether volunteers were going to fulfill commitments and conduct themselves safely and appropriately. This competition between ownership and oversight is exemplified in a Child Watchdogs supervisor’s story of a volunteer who violated the organization’s policies for transporting children and introducing them to family. The supervisor admitted she “always worr[ies]” that volunteers will engage in unauthorized acts and recalled,

I will never forget to this day, one of our volunteers had his two kids at the [museum] downtown, and he’s diabetic and blood sugar bottomed out and he passed out. And the ambulance was going to come take him away, and there were the two children . . . so he called his son to pick up the children to take them home.

The supervisor went on to exclaim, “Can we say, “No, no, no?!” emphasizing that the volunteer violated rules and should have called a staff supervisor instead. Nonetheless, the supervisor also insisted that it was important for volunteers to have freedom to take their children places even if she worried often about volunteers’ actions. Other supervisors also shared stories of the “double-edged sword” of volunteer autonomy, including accounts of how, while volunteers appreciate freedom, such independence might provoke them to become overwhelmed or deviant (e.g., neglect duties, engage in unsanctioned activities; cf. Garner & Garner, 2010).

These understandings of volunteers and managers reflect a contradictory view of this dialectic (i.e., ownership afforded at the expense of oversight and vice versa). As such, managers who held this view vacillated between fully entrusting volunteers to act independently and instituting periodic oversight—for example, VFR chiefs who required volunteers to submit records of training hours, Child Watchdogs supervisors who required monthly volunteer reports and supervision meetings, and the Teen Ministry director who monitored volunteers’ journals of their time and activities. This push and pull of concerns at play in negotiating volunteers’ responsibilities ties closely to the dialectic of formalization-flexibility, which focuses on opposing concerns in the articulation of volunteer expectations.

Formalization-Flexibility

Consistent with other superior–subordinate relationships is the reality that considerable communication between volunteers and their managers pertains to expectations for volunteer commitment and performance. In traditional employment-based arrangements, a norm may be to establish formal benchmarks and assessments for performance and then reward or reprimand employees accordingly. However, this cultural norm is not as pervasive in volunteering, as illustrated by a VFR manager whose unit was deliberating what constitutes a “reasonable expectation of [volunteer] commitment”:

[Legally] what can you require someone to do if they’re not being compensated to do it? . . . we talked about that if everybody met that requirement unilaterally, our staffing circumstance would be a lot easier. But because some people don’t meet that . . . to what level can you discipline somebody who’s not meeting that commitment?

His questioning points to the broader perception that volunteering is a more flexible, informal membership contract that, in some way, runs counter to the notion of formalized standards for commitment and performance. Such a perception was exemplified by a Teen Ministry volunteer:

I know some [volunteer] leaders who’ve gotten reprimanded for having a lot of tests the next day and missing [commitments]. And so I understand that can’t be a habit, I understand it shouldn’t be repetitive, but a one-time occurrence shouldn’t be reprimanded, I guess. And I understand they can’t necessarily communicate that [leniency] because . . . then you’re going to have a lot of kids miss. So I understand saying it’s mandatory to be there, it should be mandatory . . . but it’s also volunteer ministries . . . I’m going to give my time because I want to, but . . . maybe have some leniency in that.

Still, formal standards for volunteer commitment and performance are a key concern, bearing implications for the NPVO’s ability to function. This idea was emulated by a Child Watchdogs supervisor reflecting on the challenges of recruiting volunteers:

We have to find a way to make sure that we get enough volunteers, but we need quality volunteers . . . I could go find 10 volunteers . . . but what’s the quality of that volunteer really going to be?

Thus, a dialectical tension arises between formalization and flexibility when it comes to articulating standards for volunteer performance and commitment. Several participants in our study seemingly ignored or denied the existence of this dialectic, like a VFR volunteer who described firefighting as a “profession” with no room for flexibility:

If you [volunteers] sit there and say, “I don’t know how to do that,” I’ll kick you off my rig. I’ll drop you on the south side of [town] and make you walk home . . . it’s not that hard.

However, this unconstructive view does not reflect the reality and complexity of volunteer membership.

Intimacy-Distance

Beyond discretely role-focused interaction, considerable organizational communication pertains to relationships that members form and maintain with those within and outside their organizations—in the case of volunteers, relationships with supervisors, other volunteers, family, friends, and colleagues outside of the NPVO. Historically, employee relationships have been marked by distance in keeping with normative expectations of “professional” behavior and work–life division (i.e., more public and task-centered than private and social in nature; see Cheney & Ashcraft, 2007). Nonetheless, these normative expectations are increasingly evolving in a variety of work contexts, complicating our understandings of how intimacy and distance link to our organizational and other life experiences.

In the third space of volunteering, these relational dynamics are even more complex due to the contested nature of volunteering—that is, the reality that volunteers’ organizational relationships are not work relationships in the traditional (paid) sense but, at the same time, are not entirely family or friend relationships either. Accordingly, some volunteers anticipate personal relationships with supervisors and fellow volunteers while others do not expect or desire such interactions. Thus, volunteers and their supervisors face an uncertain terrain in establishing the degree to which volunteers’ organizational relationships remain distanced (task-focused, impersonal) versus intimate (social and personal) in nature. By extension, volunteers’ friends, family, employers, and colleagues, along with volunteers themselves, often do not fully understand or reach consensus on the intimate (or distant) role that volunteering plays in an individual’s life.

As such, many volunteers in our study held a contradictory view of intimacy and distance as it pertained to their volunteer–work/life relationships. For example, several volunteers rejected intimacy as bearing any role in volunteers’ relationships with their supervisors and fellow volunteers, exemplified by one Child Watchdogs volunteer who said,

I’m not there to socialize with you . . . I have friends and I have an active social life, so what I want from them [managers and other volunteers] is just more of a colleague-to-colleague conversation . . . I just want to take my time and make it productive so I can continue to do better work. I’m very task-oriented.

Volunteers who privileged this view further characterized more intimate views of organizational relationships as unnecessary “hand-holding,” “annoying,” or simply unprofessional.

However, yet equally contradictory in view, were participants who envisioned their relationships with supervisors and volunteers as deeply personal, thereby often forming distanced work, friend, and/or family relationships. A Teen Ministry leader illustrated this view, expressing his longing to have very close relationships with other volunteers and the expectation that “when you sign up to do Teen Ministry you should sacrifice your social life, your sleep, and many of those kinds of things, because you made this commitment.” This type of view was also held by several volunteer firefighters, some of whom told stories of getting divorced and terminated from jobs, in part, because they overly privileged intimacy and neglected distance in their relationships with managers and others in the volunteer organization.

Summary

These findings underscore equally valuable yet competing concerns, values, and goals in volunteer management including that of attracting yet also adjusting volunteers, providing ownership as well as oversight of their efforts, establishing formal yet flexible standards, and facilitating relational intimacy and distance. Through our research, we concluded that these tensions are inextricably, indelibly bound in a dialectical fashion. Thus, whether it be recruiting new volunteers or directing and supporting existing ones, we contend that the essential first step in volunteer management is to acknowledge the various communication dialectics at play in these activities; and on doing so, the next critical step is to consider how each one might be reenvisioned and enacted as a set of complementary goals and concerns (Tracy, 2004). We explore this matter and other practical implications of our findings in turn (Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Communication Dialectics in Volunteer Management.

Dialectics	Description and ways to facilitate a complementary view
Attraction-adjustment	Dialectical tensions arising from dual goals of attracting but also adjusting prospective and new volunteers to their roles. Reframed as complementary through the use of realistic volunteer previews and by emphasizing positive and negative volunteer experiences as inextricably tied during training and orientation.
Ownership-oversight	Dialectical tensions in volunteer–manager negotiation of volunteer agency and managerial involvement in volunteer activities. Endured/embraced through managerial “micropractices” of email and text-messaging and volunteer–manager “metacommunication” regarding the values of ownership and oversight (Ashcraft & Trethewey, 2004).
Formalization-flexibility	Dialectical tensions in managerial communication regarding standards for volunteer performance and commitment. Endured/embraced through metacommunication that reframed flexibility as promoting one’s abilities to uphold formal standards; also through micropractices of (a) espousing formal standards yet affording volunteers’ flexibility to be deficient in some areas and exemplary in others, and (b) maintaining formal standards while flexibly catering to volunteers’ preferred supervisory styles.
Intimacy-distance	Dialectical tensions pertaining to the tenor and bounds of volunteers’ relationships within and outside their organizations. Both concerns are simultaneously upheld by connecting volunteers in the context of role-related activities; also, reframing both concerns as mutually professional in nature.

Messages in Volunteer Recruitment and Training

We offer two ways in which the goals of attracting volunteers through positive messages and adjusting them through negative messages may be creatively reenvisioned as capable of being simultaneously served during prospective and new volunteer communication. First, similar to the concept of realistic job previews (Wanous, 1977), recruitment and orientation messages may be envisioned as opportunities for realistic volunteer previews wherein prospective volunteers and newcomers are offered positive and, within certain parameters, negative information about their volunteer roles. This view holds that by disclosing some potentially negative information about the volunteer experience, particularly that which is tied to volunteer loss, managers help to diminish false expectations and inoculate volunteers against future negative experiences (thus satisfying adjustment goals); furthermore, taking care to share this information also demonstrates concern for individuals, which, in turn, reflects favorably on the manager and organization as a whole—hence, satisfying the goal of attraction. Among our study’s participants, Teen Ministry volunteers and supervisors prominently cited realistic volunteer previews as a constructive practice of attraction and adjustment. For example, in describing their director’s approach to orientation and training, one volunteer said, “We learned that you have to put time in . . . and really invest . . . Every week he would tell us, ‘It’s a lot. Make sure this is what you want to do.’” These participants then went on to say that these messages helped them to avoid feeling overwhelmed once they began volunteering and instilled appreciation for the supervisor and organization.

Second, a complementary view of the attraction-adjustment dialectic may also be facilitated during recruitment, orientation, and training by reframing negative volunteer experiences as inextricably tied to and effectually augmenting positive ones. Put differently, this entails envisioning volunteering as consistent with the adage that “you can’t have the good without the bad.” Views consistent with this enabling juxtaposition, though not pervasive, were evident across all three types of participants in our study. Namely, as some Child Watchdogs participants noted, the joy that comes with providing a safe environment for a child is not possible without the sad reality of abuse. Similarly, VFR participants attested that the sense of value that comes with rescuing someone from a burning building is not possible without encountering dangerous situations. Likewise, a few Teen Ministry participants acknowledged that the positive bonds formed with teens are not accomplished without sacrificing one’s time. Receiving messages like these early in one’s volunteer membership can help reinforce one’s connection with the organization’s mission, all the while preparing one for the potentially surprising, mundane, or otherwise negative aspects of the volunteer experience.

Negotiating Volunteers’ Roles and Responsibilities

As a second recommended practice, we encourage managers and volunteers to reconsider their (contradictory) views, communication, and actions pertaining to volunteers’ roles and responsibilities. We suggest two ways in which ownership-oversight and formalization-flexibility dialectics may be alternatively accepted as normal and even productive. First, organizations must create spaces to openly acknowledge and discuss these dialectical values, a practice that Ashcraft and Trethewey (2004) summarized as metacommunication about tension. A Child Watchdogs volunteer offered one example of how metacommunication regarding ownership-oversight might arise:

One time [my supervisor] told me that she never, hadn’t had anyone that ever just took over and she—I think it made her a little nervous at first. We met down in [a coastal city] one time and . . . we talked and she was like, “You know I just never had anybody just take over.” And at first she was a little nervous that I was going to overstep my boundaries . . .

The volunteer went on to explain that dialoguing openly about their struggles to establish freedom and trust helped them negotiate a mutually beneficial understanding of their supervisor–subordinate relationship. As a result of this metacommunication, the two were able to collaboratively reframe ownership and oversight as complementary rather than contradictory in nature. This, though, was one of few accounts of open dialogue about ownership-oversight reported by our participants.

Alternatively, metacommunication about the formalization-flexibility dialectic was more prominent in our data, particularly among the VFR chiefs. They reportedly discussed with volunteers the need to establish standards but also promote intermittent breaks or timeouts to help guard against volunteer burnout and dropout. In doing so, they espoused formal standards but also argued that flexibility was critical to upholding these standards over time. This was illustrated by a VFR chief who described his practice of encouraging volunteer firefighters to occasionally ignore emergency calls:

Seems like a counter-productive thing to say [to take time off] . . . but when you, as a supervisor, witness them making sacrifices in their personal life [by overcommitting to volunteering] . . . sometimes you kind of need [to say] spend time with your family and this can wait . . . [if not,] that’s how you burn out our personnel.

In addition to engaging in metacommunication about the dialectics at play in negotiating volunteers’ roles and responsibilities, practitioners should also encourage micropractices (i.e., novel, everyday performances) that creatively enable members to simultaneously attend to or “walk the line” between competing goals (Tracy, 2004, p. 131; see also Ashcraft & Trethewey, 2004). With respect to ownership-oversight, micropractices of technology use may be particularly constructive. For example, one Child Watchdogs supervisor described email and text-message “check-ins” as a means to afford volunteers ownership over their activities while also preserving a degree of managerial oversight. However, examples of managerial micropractices in this vein were also scarce in our data.

Alternatively, there were more illustrations of managers’ micropractices associated with formalization-flexibility. One example reported by several participants was enforcing general standards for volunteer commitment and performance yet rationalizing that surpassing some standards afforded volunteers’ flexibility to be deficient in others; to illustrate, a Child Watchdogs supervisor described one of her volunteers as:

magnificent—I call her my bulldog because she doesn’t take no for an answer. I would never let her go because she is a wonderful advocate, but yeah . . . she sometimes gets a little . . . outside the box [laughing]. I’m being generous.

Similarly, a VFR chief rationalized retaining aging volunteer firefighters who have limited capabilities yet high commitment:

We don’t tell the old people to leave . . . We don’t say, “Hey you know, great, thank you for your services, but go the fuck home.” You know? A lot of that’s from respect and a lot of it’s from not wanting to step on the guy’s toes that’s been there for 60 years.

Another illustration of managerial micropractices of living within formalization and flexibility was inspired, but not modeled, by our participants. Specifically, the micropractice referred to as “offering support needed to rise to the challenge” was informed by dissatisfied volunteers in all three contexts who perceived their leaders as exhibiting strict expectations yet being unwilling to accommodate the volunteer in pursuing those standards. Instead, managers should be encouraged to not only establish high expectations but also personalize their supervisory styles according to volunteers’ preferences and needs. In this way, formal standards are upheld while managerial flexibility is also exhibited. For many volunteers, this entailed customization of volunteer feedback and support, like a Child Watchdogs who wanted positive encouragement before criticism (“Instead of . . . ‘you did good,’ it was, ‘you need to not . . .’ It was the negative [only] instead of a positive and then negative”) or a Teen Ministry volunteer who said his supervisor needed to “learn to constructively suggest things if you are not doing things correctly and not be silent.”

Reframing Volunteers’ Relationships

Finally, we encourage managers and volunteers to consider the ever-present values of intimacy and distance at play when defining the tenor and bounds of volunteers’ relationships with those inside and outside their organizations. One way to facilitate the dual pursuit of both is for managers to craft volunteer activities to creatively fulfill volunteers’ desires to foster relationships with fellow members yet also respect their time and maintain boundaries with their other life commitments—a practice that is particularly important for volunteers whose needs for relationships and connection are fulfilled elsewhere. For example, opportunities for social interaction could be integrated within the context of broader role-related activities, as opposed to having exclusively social events such as volunteer “mixers.” As one Child Watchdogs volunteer said, “I’m a pretty social guy, I like going to things where there’s pie and coffee, but I prefer it to be in a structured [setting] . . . connected to what we’re doing.” Thus, the goals of intimacy and distance are creatively balanced and upheld.

A second means of satisfying both the goals of intimacy and distance requires a more complex reframing of the notion of professionalism among volunteers and their managers. In our research, Child Watchdogs volunteers particularly struggled with envisioning intimacy and distance as mutually connected and equally professional in nature, but one volunteer exemplified this type of constructive reframing:

I worked at [a government research lab] for 30 years . . . I had to get used to a different level of professionalism . . . I often looked at some of the interactions at Child Watchdogs as less professional than I was accustomed to; and then I realized that it was just a whole different dynamic, and I just needed to just adjust and sort of let go of my expectations.

Because of her employment-based frame of reference, distance was initially equated with professionalism, but after adjusting to her supervisor’s more intimate style of interaction, she ultimately concluded that having personal relationships in the organization within certain boundaries (i.e., distance) was not only professional but also enhanced her volunteer abilities. Alternatively, the VFR participants more easily envisioned professionalism as a fusion of intimacy and distance; as one firefighter said, “Everybody’s family until it comes down to getting the work done. Then we quit joking around. And everybody knows that it’s not like you have to tell people that. Everybody does it automatically. You kind of pick it up.” Beyond these practical implications, we highlight the theoretical implications of this research next.