Beyond Assumptions of Altruism: Job Satisfaction in an Age of Nonprofit Professionalization

Research on the nonprofit sector suggests that simply working for an organization that endeavors to serve the public is intrinsically rewarding and provides job satisfaction (Mirvis 1992; Brown and Yoshioka 2003; Benz 2005; Borzaga and Depedri 2005). I examine program officers working in the international aid industry (“aid workers”) across four nonprofit organizations and utilize methodology from job fit research to test which work values, when fulfilled, most strongly predict their job satisfaction. I find that the strongest predictors of job satisfaction are not in the arenas generally highlighted by research on public service motivation (Vandenabeele, Brewer, and Ritz 2014). Specifically, aid workers with higher value for social service do not have higher job satisfaction, when all other factors are held constant. Moreover, even when people claimed that fulfilling social service objectives was a feature they valued in their work environment, the extent to which their organization fulfilled social service objectives did not significantly increase their job satisfaction. Instead, the fulfillment of more personally (rather than publicly) beneficial values, such as affective work hygiene and cognitive engagement, were found to be more likely to lead to satisfaction. These findings encourage future research on nonprofit domains to investigate a wider range of work values rather than relying upon assumptions of altruism and public service motivation. Taken alongside research demonstrating younger employee’ desire to balance work and personal goals (Cennamo and Gardner 2008; Ng, Schweitzer, and Lyons 2010; Twenge, Campbell, Hoffman, and Lance 2010) these results suggest a broader shift in the character and condition of the international aid workforce and encourage scholars to measure motivation and values with more expansive scales.