He who helps others becomes helpless : the paradox between organisational values and workforce sustainability in the UK third sector

Abstract: This research aims to question and uncover the social sustainability paradox arising from the inconsistent practice of third sector organisations’ values, for both their external stakeholders and internal workforce. To achieve so, this thesis discusses how the values are created, delivered and affected through the topology of the third sector, the organisational theories, sustainability theory and game theory. It is identified that altruism is a common trait for the workforce, which works to serve the public benefits. However, the workforce can be impacted through the donor control under the professionalism influences. Hence, there appeared tensions between the third sector organisations and their workforce. Such tensions are associated concerns of social sustainability. In the efforts to unravel the themes behind the tensions, various sets of theories are reviewed and compared. Through the theoretical emergence and evidence of employment hardship, the social sustainability theory is used to examine the tensions between internal value realisation and external value delivery. The lenses of stewardship/democracy governance theories and managerial leadership are applied to develop subset models of sustainability as the hypotheses to reach value consistency. Lastly, the examinations are placed under the prisoner’s dilemma theory to echo the importance of consistency of third sector’s intrinsic and extrinsic values. In turn, the cooperation links for governance theories and managerial leadership through horizontal communications and power relations are verified for the strategic importance to achieve social sustainability for the third sector workforce. The limitations of this research can be attributable to the simplification and generalisation processes of the theory applications and the definition of the third sector. In addition, the possibility of undiscovered theories and practices, adding to the test of research, can entail the likelihood of different findings or prove otherwise the findings of emergent theories as discovered hereunder.