Volunteers’ Identification and Commitment in a Publicly Disgraced Organization

Abstract: Drawing on a study of the Swedish Red Cross, the research intends to examine how individual volunteers identify themselves with the organization that has suffered from a public disgrace and how this has impacted their commitment. In the existing literature, volunteers’ organizational identification has been commonly theorized to predict their commitment, which draws our interest and concerns to further investigate the relationship of the two classical concepts specifically in the context of image crisis. Underpinned by an interpretive approach, 10 face-to-face semi- structured interviews have been conducted. The findings suggest that volunteers still stay with Swedish Red Cross and continue committed to their voluntary work despite the image crisis. On this basis, the study problematizes this simplistic link between organizational identification and commitment empirically and theoretically. It contributes to both the organizational studies and the voluntary sector literature by showing that the multiple identification targets, the possible positive effect of disidentification, and the neutral identification in terms of the spirit of volunteering could offer more insight into understanding the complicated rather than simplistic link.