Beyond Boundaries: Organizational Factors Shaping Role Flexibility in Volunteer-Paid Staff Collaborations

Beschreibung

Western welfare states increasingly encourage citizens and
communities to share responsibility for social care, reshaping
how nonprofit organizations deliver services through
partnerships between paid staff and volunteers (van Bochove
et al., 2018; van Dam & Raeymaeckers, 2025). While these
collaborations improve service responsiveness when
volunteers and paid staff take complementary roles, research
reveals patterns of role ambiguity that generate tension and
prompt paid staff to demarcate their domain strictly,
obstructing volunteer integration. However, when both
volunteers and paid staff embrace role flexibility, they are able
to adapt services to changing needs (Bronstein, 2003).
Although existing studies have examined boundary
negotiation and role integration patterns in mixed workforces
(Bonizzoni & Lampredi, 2025; van Bochove et al., 2018), little
research explores how organizational context shapes role
flexibility. Yet organizational factors significantly influence
volunteers' and staff's ability to adapt their roles to meet client
needs. Moreover, previous research on organizational context
has primarily adopted a volunteer management perspective,
focusing on retention and motivation (Alfes, Antunes, &
Shantz, 2017). Our study investigates organizational factors
shaping relational dynamics between volunteers and paid staff.
Using Bronstein's (2003) interdisciplinary collaboration
framework, we analyze the meso-context in which role
flexibility processes are shaped at the microlevel. Our research
question is: What structural factors influence role flexibility in
volunteer-paid staff collaboration? Through semi-structured
interviews with 30 paid employees and volunteers across three
nonprofit organizations in Flanders, we conducted a thematic
analysis to explore how organizational contexts shape role
flexibility. Drawing on path dependency theory (Schrëyogg &
Sydow, 2011), our findings reveal that the foundations of the
collaboration and the governance structure in which they
develop create distinct trajectories determining role flexibility.
Specifically, we identify how initial establishment of
collaborations—whether through top-down implementation or
bottom-up growth—and governance structure set
organizations on different paths. These path-dependent

trajectories manifest in three collaboration types:
supplementary (minimal interdependence), complementary
(highly interdependent roles with distinct but mutually
reinforcing contributions), and substitute (overlapping roles
where team members can replace one another). Our results
show that organizations with top-down defined collaborations
embedded in vertical governance structures demonstrate
limited reflection opportunities and supplementary task
arrangements, resulting in minimal role flexibility.
Conversely, bottom-up developed collaborations within
horizontal structures enable high role flexibility through
substitutable arrangements, but often at the cost of
organizational coherence if coordination is lacking. A middle
ground is found in vertically structured organizations that
decentralize decision-making, fostering complementary
collaborations with moderate role flexibility through
continuous reflection processes. To conclude, our research
demonstrates how deeply embedded organizational patterns
create path-dependent trajectories that either enable or obstruct
role flexibility in mixed workforces. While previous research
has identified various ways paid staff negotiate their
professional domain relative to volunteers (van Bochove et al.,
2018; van Dam & Raeymaeckers, 2025), we advance this
literature by revealing the organizational conditions under
which these negotiations unfold. This contextual
understanding is crucial: efforts to foster constructive
collaboration cannot succeed without addressing the structural
factors that systematically shape boundary work between
professional and volunteer domains.

Zeitraum	15 Juli 2026
Ereignistitel	17th International ISTR Conference: Strengthening the Foundations of the Third Sector
Veranstaltungstyp	Konferenz
Ort	Lissabon, PortugalAuf Karte anzeigen
Bekanntheitsgrad	International