The impacts of donors’ perceived personal resource scarcity on their intentions to volunteer for low- and high-responsibility recipients: the mediating role of perceived social worth

Abstract

Few studies have focused on voluntary work from a marketing-centric perspective. This study aims to clarify the impacts of donors’ perceived personal resource scarcity on volunteering intentions, by considering an important boundary role: recipients’ responsibility and the mediating role of perceived social worth. In Study 1, when they perceived their own personal resources to be scarce, the participants were less willing to contribute their time to help recipients with high levels of responsibility for their own plight. In Study 2, the direction of the means is in line with H1’s expectations, even though the results did not reach a conventional level of significance. In addition, in the case of the low-responsibility condition, across the two studies there was no difference in the volunteering intentions of those who perceived their own personal resources to be scarce and those who did not. This study found that an individual’s perceived social worth is an important underlying mechanism. The results of this study can be used by nonprofit organizations when developing their targeting and advertising strategies.

Keywords:

• Volunteering intention
• donors’ perceived personal resource scarcity
• recipients’ responsibility
• perceived social worth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan, under grant MOST: 108-2410-H-005 -048 -MY3 for financial support.

Notes on contributors

Ming-Yi Chen

Ming-Yi Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Marketing, National Chung Hsing University. She received her Ph.D. from the National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her research interests are consumer psychology, communication and persuasion in advertising, charity and green marketing. Her papers have been published in the International Journal of Advertising, the Journal of Service Management, the Journal of Business Research, the European Journal of Marketing, Electronic Commerce Research, the Online Information Review, the Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, the International Journal of Consumer Studies, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.