Study Incentive Mechanism For Volunteers In Contemporary China

Establishing and improving volunteer incentive mechanism is essential to guarantee volunteers’ interest, strengthen volunteers’enthusiasm, and stabilize volunteer team. Not only can it enhances volunteers’ service level and quality, but also provides long-term guaranty to volunteer team’s future development in China. Enlightened by hierarchy of needs theory, social capital theory, and comprehensive motivation theory, this research investigate some volunteers from communities, companies, government-affiliated institutions, universities, Non-Government Organizations (NGO), and charities through interview, including 23 volunteer organizations,2 relevant organization, and 35 informants. The researcher summarizes current volunteer motivation situation, analyses factors influencing volunteer incentive mechanism, points out existing problems of current mechanism, and gives corresponding suggestions. Basing on above discussion, this article proposes "the comprehensive incentive model".The article is composed by the following parts:The first part is introduction. The introduction articulates the meaning of this research in detail, goes through and analyzes recent academic researches on incentive mechanism. In the following, it elaborates the theoretical perspective and research methods of this research.The second part is to analyze current volunteer motivation situation basing on investigation. Firstly, on incentive system, national and local governments are already making efforts to enhance and improve incentive mechanism. However, there still are imbalance between various areas and levels. Secondly, through analysis that divides incentive into three categories including individual motivation, organization motivation, and social motivation, it is clear that the volunteering value and essence is more spiritual-oriented. Therefore, incentive contents tend to focus on spiritual instead of material. Thirdly, as for incentive form, delay incentive is the main character of incentive time. Organization inventive has relatively low frequency. Extrinsic and intrinsic incentive, direct and indirect incentive work together. Fourthly, when it comes to incentive effect, basing on social capital theory, incentive mechanism helps to strengthen volunteers’ enthusiasm, ensure volunteer organization’s benign and long-term operation, and has positive effect to service target population and society.The third part is to discuss the influencing elements of incentive mechanism. From macro perspective, relevant law and policy, public opinion, social media, and the culture of volunteer service are significant elements to establish incentive mechanism. From micro perspective, organizational rule and regulation, service content and area, supporting fund, and the quality of volunteers are all influencing elements.Last but not least, this article analyzes existing problems of current mechanism from four dimensions including nation, social, organization and individual. And corresponding suggestions are also provided. Basing on Potter and Lawler’s comprehensive incentive model and taking actual volunteer service development progress of China into consideration, the research proposes "the comprehensive incentive model". Hopefully, this article will provide some helpful insights to establish and improve volunteer incentive mechanism, and promote volunteer service and civil society in China.