Volunteersis the first comprehensive look at the organizational behavior of volunteer workers, drawing upon both original research and the existing scholarly work in this field.

Interview data from China are used to test an argument that executives develop personal connections in societies with underdeveloped legal support for private businesses. In China, such connections are called guanxi. An underdeveloped legal framework makes private-company executives more dependent on guanxi than executives in state-owned or collective-hybrid companies. Compared to the other executives, private-company executives considered business connections more important, depended more on connections for protection, had more government connections, gave more unreciprocated gifts, and trusted their connections more.

A field test of the sufficiency of justification hypothesis is reported. It is hypothesized that volunteers will experience insufficient justifica­tion for their efforts, which will be reflected in their job attitudes and motivation. The hypothesis is supported, except for reported intrinsic moti­vation; the implications of this exception are explored.

Is it particularly difficult to reward employees' performance in public orga­nizations? Here it will forcefully be suggested that this assumption is false, that managers in or out of government have powerful informal rewards at their command. Certainly, there are important differences in the formal per­sonnel and pay policies between government and smaller businesses. Clearly, most employees in businesses are not subject to the variety of goals and con­stituents that often occur in public organizations; yet it will be suggested here that dwelling on the limitations of normal procedures and external links is the leading contributor to the neglect of rewarding good performance in government. In public organizations, the expectation that performance in itself cannot be rewarded leads to few rewards for good performance, a classic self-fulfilling hypothesis. The chapter begins with an analysis of the limitations of formal policies for effectively rewarding performance. This is followed by an argument for the use of informal systems to reward performance, with special attention to the strengths and limitations of this approach. Finally, the chapter concludes with specific steps that individual managers and policymakers alike can take to implement effective informal procedures to reward good performance.

Compensation plans that base pay on an individual's recent performance, such as merit pay, enjoy prominence in both the professional compensation literature and in the popular imagination. Such plans have the attraction of clear communication of performance expectations and give employees the opportunity to increase their incomes through their own efforts. That these plans have become synonymous with "fairness" is reflected in the widespread support for President Reagan's call for merit pay for schoolteachers. Compensation textbooks and journals reflect the general belief in these plans through their devotion of substantial space to discussions of the design and implementation of such programs, despite the fact that individual performance-contingent pay makes up a very small portion of most employees' total compensation.