Hourly Payment and Volunteering: The Effect of Organizational Practices on Decisions About Time Use

We examine how organizational practices making an economic evaluation of time salient, such as hourly pay, can lead people to spend less time on uncompensated work - volunteering. Using nationally representative survey data, in Study 1 we showed that, with other factors that might affect time decisions controlled, people paid by the hour were both less likely to volunteer and spent less time volunteering than counterparts who were not paid hourly. Study 2 showed that having people calculate their hourly wage was associated with decreased willingness to volunteer and that this experimental manipulation only affected people not paid by the hour. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]