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The authors argue that many core findings are not as established as often assumed in the study of corporate volunteering programs, and they assess this possibility by reporting a meta-analysis of both organizational and employee participation that includes relations with antecedents and outcomes at both organizational and employee levels.

The authors perform a meta-analysis of 57 sources, including 30 peer-reviewed articles, 16 theses/dissertations, 8 unpublished manuscripts, 2 conference presentations and 1 book chapter.

Of the antecedents, organizational size only had a small relation with organizational participation, but the effect of corporate social responsibility orientation was very large on organizational participation. Demographic characteristics as well as personality traits had a small relation with employee participation, whereas the effect of volunteering attitudes was large on employee participation. Of the outcomes, organizational participation did not significantly relate to customer perceptions. Employee participation had nonsignificant or small relations with well-being, commitment, job satisfaction and positive behaviors; however, organizational participation also significantly related to all employee-level outcomes, and the effect was significantly stronger than employee participation for two of four outcomes.

Organizations can better understand the true influence of corporate volunteering programs, aiding their bottom line and employee well-being.

Several commonly assumed antecedents and outcomes do not relate to corporate volunteering participation, and future research should be redirected to more influential effects. The authors’ discussion highlights theories that may be particularly beneficial for the study of corporate volunteering, including social identity theory and role expansion theory.

The purpose of this transformative service research (TSR) is to apply, innovate on and extend the understanding of service-dominant logic (SDL) perspectives, sustainable service ecosystem design ideas, transformative value and meeting sustainable development goals (SDGs). This study explores these through volunteers’ lived experiences and their perceived health and well-being outcomes in the context of botanic gardens as health-care service settings.

A total of 3 UK botanic gardens and 84 volunteers between 22 and 87 years of age participated in this qualitative study. Volunteering stories were collected through emails, telephone exchanges, online and in-person interviews, free-flowing discussion and field observations. These were coded and analysed by using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, NVivo 14 Plus and Leximancer. Thematic analysis facilitated the mapping of well-being outcomes highlighting transformative value against existing health and well-being indices.

Insights extend knowledge into SDL, TSR and transformative value experienced by volunteers across three UK botanic garden service ecosystems. Environmental, organisational and personal factors, and physical, mental and social health outcomes are presented to emphasise transformative value experienced, especially in retiree volunteers. Theoretical contribution is in the form of empirical evidence to support and extend insights about transformative value and more so, significant epistemological change and meeting SDGs in botanic gardens. Results add to contemporary TSR on health-care-related well-being outcomes and ideas regarding sustainable service ecosystem design.

It is recommended that service research be extended across other botanic gardens, as well as other novel underexplored contexts for comparative studies of transformative value. Continued development and consideration of service designs as ongoing efforts to redefine and reimagine services marketing innovation for botanic gardens are recommended. Botanic gardens are complex service ecosystems worthy of rigorous service research to capture and measure the impact and outcome of ongoing work of the sector in advancing SDGs and having a transformative effect on individual and societal health and well-being.

This study highlights opportunities for greater area-based, coordinated, collaborative, multi-stakeholder services marketing partnerships for strategic sustainable service ecosystem design for the botanic gardens and health-care sectors. These sectors can make better use of service research and marketing to further innovate and co-develop health and well-being strategies, campaigns and opportunities to develop services to transform and influence positive health and well-being outcomes for people. Results reveal greater opportunities for collaborative partnership and services marketing’s role and practice for the ongoing vitality and viability of botanic gardens. Joint efforts would enable innovation on sustainable service ecosystem design, advancing SDGs and improving life on planet Earth.

Transformative value linked to newfound life experiences and meaning to life after retiring with a range of factors, and health and well-being outcomes were prominent. Social connections to the wider community were present, revealing links to a range of people who may not have traditionally had contact with botanic garden heritage and their strategic efforts. Therefore, it is services marketing opportunities for botanic gardens that hold one key to greater transformative value, sustainability and greater influence and impact on individual and societal health and well-being.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first TSR on botanic gardens as health-care service settings, resulting in a conceptual framework on transformative value and well-being outcomes in meeting SDGs. It extends insights on SDL, sustainable service ecosystem design and roles of marketing for the common good. Botanic gardens are unique research institutes, highly acclaimed for research, conservation, education and displays of special botanical collections, as well as providing health care, among other impactful SDG opportunities. This can be made more explicit through ecosystemic thinking, service research and integrated services marketing of botanic garden’ roles and contributions worldwide.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the outcomes of the Library Volunteerism Program of student volunteers in a college library of Mumbai.

The survey and interview method was used to collate the achieved outcomes and expectations of 112 student volunteers who participated in the Library Volunteerism Program.

The Library Volunteerism Program strengthened the library‐student bond. Though the student volunteers felt satisfied about making an important contribution to the organisation, they rarely found it personally fulfilling. The volunteers expected more substantial outcomes and flexibility from the Library Volunteerism Program.

The study found that making the volunteerism experience more exciting, challenging and beneficial to the volunteers is essential for developing a long‐lasting and mutually beneficial relationship between the volunteers and the library. The suggested guidelines should allow similar libraries to design an effective library volunteerism program.

This is the first paper which discusses library volunteerism outcomes in the college libraries of India.

The ability to attract and retain volunteers is crucial for not-for-profit organizations, and consequently, the need to understand and manage volunteers’ engagement is paramount. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of five volunteer engagement dimensions (cognitive, affective, behavioral, social and spiritual engagement) on perceived value-in-context, and its subsequent role for volunteer retention. Thus, providing for the first time an understanding of how unique types of value are determined through different facets of volunteer engagement.

To establish the nature and consequences of volunteer engagement, the authors collaborated with an Australian not-for-profit service organization. Using a survey method, the authors studied the organization’s volunteer workforce resulting in 464 usable responses. To capture volunteers’ degree of spiritual engagement, this paper introduces a rigorously developed unidimensional measure.

The results demonstrate the importance of the five engagement dimensions on volunteers’ perceived value-in-context, while highlighting significant effect differences including some counterintuitive consequences. The authors also establish the role of spiritual engagement and demonstrate the impact of value-in-context for volunteer retention.

This research explores the volunteer engagement-retention chain, by empirically studying the role of value-in-context. The authors provide first evidence for the relationship between volunteer engagement and value-in-context, examining the independent yet relative effects of various facets of volunteer engagement. In doing so, the authors offer new insight into the dimensionality of the volunteer engagement construct, broadening its conceptualization to include spiritual engagement as a core constituent. The authors further demonstrate the impact of value-in-context on volunteer retention, helping organizations to better make sense of meaningful volunteer experiences with long-lasting impacts and mutual benefits.

This study assesses the relevance of both individual and contextual factors as an antecedent to employee participation in corporate volunteering (CV) activities and affective organizational commitment and inter-role conflict as an outcome of employee volunteering. This study draws from the functional theory of motivation, social exchange theory and role strain perspective to explain hypothesized relationship of the study constructs.

A questionnaire survey was administered with 461 employee volunteers who had participated in company-sponsored volunteering programs. The authors adopted structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the study hypotheses.

The findings from the survey suggest that altruistic motives and organization CV capability will impact employee's participation in CV. The results highlight that employee participation in CV enhances affective organizational commitment, indicating that employee volunteering creates inter-role conflict.

Though the study has identified inter-role conflict as a potentially unfavorable outcome, exploring when and how employee volunteering will create a negative effect will add significant value to organizations to protect the interest of their employees.

This study provides insights to understand the relative effects of self- and other-oriented motives. The results suggest that organizations have more directed and carefully designed employee volunteering activities to enable more favorable benefits to employees.

This study contributes to expanding the knowledge on the phenomenon of employee volunteering by introducing and empirically validating an integrated framework of antecedents and consequences of employee volunteering.

The paper investigates how the engagement of a group of actors (the volunteers), previously unexplored in service ecosystems literature, contributes to generating new co-creation activities and well-being outcomes in the healthcare service ecosystem (HSE). Moreover, the study analyses how the provision and integration of volunteers’ resources help to explain the HSE self-adjustment favouring the re-humanisation of service.

The article zooms in on the volunteers’ activities in an HSE. A qualitative approach is adopted, and an empirical investigation is grounded in data gathered from Kids Kicking Cancer (KKC) Italia, a volunteer association operating in the paediatric oncology ward of Italian hospitals. Data are collected and triangulated through in-depth interviews, volunteers’ diaries and observations. The analysis is conducted by adopting an interpretative thematic analysis technique.

The study provides a conceptual framework explaining how volunteers’ value co-creation activities influence the HSE’s self-adjustment by leading to a re-humanisation of services. The paper also contributes to the state of knowledge by identifying seven categories of volunteers’ value co-creation activities, two of which are completely new in the literature (co-responsibility and empowerment).

The paper contributes to the service research literature by identifying empirically grounded value co-creation activities extending the understanding of self-adjustment and re-humanisation of the service ecosystem.

Non-profit organizations (NPO) contribute significantly to the welfare of citizens and communities. Engagement in volunteering is crucial for sustaining volunteer motivation and for the effective and efficient functioning of NPO, with significant implications for society at large. Yet, literature on volunteer engagement (VE) is limited to date. Grounded on service-dominant logic, self-congruity theory and self-determination theory, this study aims to understand what motivates VE and how it may evolve into a co-creation process valuable to NPO and its stakeholders.

Based on survey data collected from 450 volunteers, working with a diverse set of NPO, a comprehensive model of drivers and outcomes of VE was empirically tested using PLS-SEM, considering the mediating role of volunteers' congruence with the core values of the NPO.

The impact of volunteers' perceived autonomy, competence and relatedness on VE and its subsequent role in volunteers' loyalty and extra-role engagement behaviors (i.e. co-development, influencing and mobilizing behaviors) were validated. Moreover, the study validates value congruence as an internalizing mediating mechanism in the engagement process, a role that has been implied but not empirically tested.

The study contributes to the engagement and volunteering literature, which despite an unprecedented parallel have developed almost independently, with limited reference to one another. As the nomological network of VE is still underexplored, the study extends the engagement literature to the volunteering sector, validating the key (but underexplored) role of self-determination needs and value congruence in driving VE and value co-creation behaviors. The study further adds to engagement research while addressing other actors' engagement beyond the customer–brand dyad. While adopting a seldom explored marketing perspective of VE, this study provides NPO valuable insights on how to manage and engage volunteers.

Volunteerism underpins the sustainability of communities and a wide range of organizations. A review of the academic literature on volunteerism yields few studies considering the role of emotions, but those that do exist clearly indicate that emotions are critical factors in the recruitment, retention, and wellbeing of volunteers. The contribution of this chapter is to provide a review of the existing published academic research on emotions in the context of volunteerism, and to put out a call for emotions research in this critical aspect of sustainable communities and organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the stages involved in developing an audit to determine the best wildlife and conservation organization to volunteer with.

The paper outlines details of the analysis and assessment of 53 organizations based on nine core criteria. The framework developed for this purpose also provides a tool that could be used to assess other organizations.

Publication of the Wildlife and Conservation Volunteering Guide has given volunteers a resource that enables them to make informed decisions about which organization to volunteer with and to enable the featured organizations to reflect on their own relative attractiveness to volunteers.

The viewpoint highlights several unintended consequences of an audit and demonstrates that published audit criteria prompt organizations to instigate changes.

Drawing on expectancy theory, this research explores how and when volunteers’ motivational drives for volunteering relate to organizational policies and practices. The paper analyses four areas of motivational association – affiliation, beliefs, career development and egoistic motives – together with organizational human resource (HR) policies and practices.

The study used a qualitative approach and through 17 interviews of the volunteer managers associated with 13 non-profit organizations (NPOs) examined that how through HR policies and practices, an NPO efficiently taps motivational drives of volunteers and maintains their spirit of volunteering.

The findings of the study indicated that the same behaviour may serve different functions for different individuals. Most of the motivational drives need to be tapped with specific tasks and events to become a source of fulfilment for volunteers, this plays a vital role in their decisions to continue volunteering. NPOs’ HR practices without volunteers’ motivation cannot serve any purpose. In the same vein, volunteers’ motivation cannot sustain for a longer period if it is not properly linked with organizational HR practices.

The research findings may lack generalizability because of the selected research approach.

A great part of existing research, not previously captured in literature, is focussed on the assessment of the motivational underpinnings with respect to HR policies and practices.