Corporate Volunteering at Fidelidade: Analysis of Skills Development, Organizational Identification and Organizational Commitment.

Corporate Volunteering is increasingly emerging as a way for companies to focus on corporate social responsibility, which serves as a vital mechanism for demonstrating a firm's commitment to the welfare of communities and the environment. The primary aim of this study is to assess the effects of corporate volunteering for employees who participate in those activities, namely for their skill development, organizational identification and organizational commitment. The research is conducted in an insurance company who has been involved in corporate volunteering activities for a considerable period of time. Through an online survey with anonymous responses, a sample of 213 employees was gathered, of which 129 had already participated in volunteer activities. When comparing volunteers with non-volunteers, no significant differences were found for organizational identification and organizational commitment. Thus, the main benefit appears to be the development of skills through volunteer activities. According to the answers of the volunteer group, respect, teamwork, and ethics were the skills most enhanced through volunteer activities. Moreover, employees who participated in more volunteer activities tend to have significantly higher means of skill development than those who only participated in one activity. Stepwise regression was used to analyse which skills had the highest predictive power for the variables under study. For organizational commitment, only knowledge updating was retained by the model and had a positive impact. For organizational identification, the model retained three skills, knowledge updating, proactivity and humility. While the impact of the first two is positive, the impact of humility is negative. Since no differences were found between volunteers and non-volunteers, we attempted to identify other sociodemographic characteristics of the sample that may have influenced results. For organizational commitment significant differences were found for gender, age, marital status, having children, education level, type of contract, tenure in the organization or holding a managerial role. For organizational identification significant differences were only found for gender and holding a managerial role.