| Sport organizations and events provide key sites for volunteer involvement, and at the same time, depend on volunteers for success. Understanding volunteer motivation and commitment may enable sport event managers to develop better recruitment, selection, training, organizing, reward, and retention strategies, and ultimately benefit the organizations, volunteers, and service recipients. The purposes of this study were to understand volunteers' demographics, motivation, commitment, and the relationships among these in elite level sport events.;Managers could consider sport participants and spectators as a potential volunteer pool for recruitment, and use purposive motivation to predict volunteer commitment levels. Providing volunteers with opportunities to contribute to the event, get involved with the event, identify with the event, and enjoy the event could meet their motivations and facilitate the reciprocal relationship between sport and volunteerism.;A total of 241 volunteers from the 2008 Ryder Cup completed the web-based survey prior to the event. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using Structural Equation Modeling with AMOS 18.0 in an exploratory fashion to compare and explore the factorial structure of sport event volunteer motivation. A factorial structure with 18 motivation items loaded on five factors (i.e., purposive, leisure, enhancement, identity, external influence) was identified moderately fitting the present data. ANOVA and MANOVA results suggested that volunteers in different demographic groups had consistent and high commitment to the event but emphasized different motivations. Multiple regression and Structural Equation Modeling both suggested that purposive, leisure, and identity motivation factors were the effective predictors of volunteer commitment. |
