This research investigates the relationship between social interaction and job    satisfaction amongst people volunteering for non profit organizations.    The idea that the social relationships established in the work environment    can affect job satisfaction is well stated in the organizational and management    literature and has become a central topic in social capital theories. In a number  of paper (Rice and Mitchell, 1973; Dean, Brass, 1985; Flap, 2001), which have    specifically studied employees’ perceptions of their work, it has been proved that under specific conditions social ties are likely to lead to job satisfaction and that, furthermore, different configurations of individual social networks can variously    influence specific aspects of satisfaction. Literature on non profit has examined    the role of interactions as well mainly with reference to conventional workers    (Borzaga, Tortia, 2006), while scarce attention has been devoted to volunteers, despite the importance of their activity.   

Regarding satisfaction with active volunteering as a particular kind of job   satisfaction, in which monetary reward is absent and either altruistic or relational motivations are greatly important (Meier, Stutzer, 2004), and drawing on  the literature on social capital, we claim that volunteers’ satisfaction as workers   can be affected by social relationships taking place within their organization    in two different and possibly co-existing manners. Firstly, since in non profit    organizations social interactions are usually central and dynamics intense, volunteers can be interested in and benefit from rewards others than income, in term of specific aspects of social capital. To be precise, following Lin (1999) and    Flap (2001) on instrumental social capital and its goal specificity, we posit that    an individual social network with a given structure and content can impact on    different aspects of job satisfaction (H1), which is seen as a multidimensional    concept: networks of strategic and work-related ties can promote a volunteer’s    satisfaction with instrumental aspects of the job, like non redundant information or competences (H1A), while networks of solidarity and friendship ties can    increase satisfaction with relational aspects of the job, like social climate, cooperation and, most important, positive regard by others and making new friends (H1B). Secondly, we state that volunteers’ perceptions and attitudes towards  their activity derive from the social context in which they are formulated (H2);  in other words, network interaction patterns can affect distinct dimensions of job  satisfaction according to a social influence or .contagion’ effect (Doreian, 1989b;  Ibarra, Andrews, 1993). Since volunteers tend to establish their opinions on the  activity (i.e. their level of job satisfaction) by taking into account the opinions  of their significant others, whom their are variously connected through social  ties, beside by reaction to constraints and opportunities granted by the social  system (Leenders, 2002), different degrees of embeddeness in social networks  can bring to a different evaluation of the volunteering experience.  So as to verify the effects of social interactions on instrumental and relational  job satisfaction, we refer to social network analysis (Wasserman, Faust, 1994).  We focus on different social relationships within the non profit organization, ob-  served and collected through an appositely defined questionnaire, and represent  each of them as a network, whose nodes are volunteers and ties relationships  amongst couples of them. To test the first hypothesis (H1A and H1B) we compute several network measures at actor level capturing the effect of goal-specific  social capital, like in and outdegree centrality, betweenness centrality (Freeman,  1979) and separate clique membership (Krackhardt, 1999) and then for each relationship we observe their influence on the two kinds of satisfaction through  a multiple regression model with optimal scaling (Van der Kooij, Meulman,  1997). To verify the second hypothesis, we apply a spatial autoregressive model  (Anselin, 1988), which explicitly models network interdependencies, assuming  ego’s opinion is a weighted version of the opinion of alters.  The complete model is formalized as follows: 

Si = rWSi + bX + e

where:

Si = job satisfaction, distinguished in instrumental (SI ) and relational (SR) satisfaction

r = spatial autoregressive parameter for the contagion effect

W = weighted matrix

X = individual indipendent variables for the local effect

b =  

e = error term; " e? N(0; s²I)

We tested the model on a non profit organization providing primary health-care in Northern Italy. We created an ad hoc questionnaire exploring different aspects of job satisfaction1 and two kinds of relationships amongst volunteers, trust and friendship within the organization. The questionnaire was appositely validated (Cronbach a = 0:94) and self-administered to 100 volunteers in October-November 2007. Firstly, we controlled for the dependence of satisfaction on individual covariates, .finding out that instrumental job satisfaction is affected by mainly intrinsic motivations and time devoted to volunteering

(R2 = 0:95), while relational job satisfaction is influenced by seniority, involvement in coordination activities and desire to be esteemed (R2 = 0:51). Then, we added to individual independent variables some selected network measures, thus observing the prevailing importance of trust on friendship interactions for both the dimensions of job satisfaction and, in particular, according to provisional results, the positive effect on instrumental job satisfaction of the possibility to have access to new competences (R2 = 0:97) and on relational satisfaction, rather unexpectedly, of being positively regarded by numerous others (R2 = 0:67).

In the end, we will examine the contagion effect in order to verify whether job satisfaction is influenced by that of connected others.

Keywords: job satisfaction, non profit, social capital, spatial econometrics

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