Impact of participating in corporate volunteering on commitment of employees

While corporations who are responsive to the society's expectations, needs and desires, and those who serve the society by way of corporate volunteering and by identifying strategic goals in this direction continue to be the subject of research in other countries, it is noticable that interest in corporate volunteering has been increasing in Turkey, but not too many research has been done on this subject. This research has been done to contribute to the existing research, as well as the Turkish literature. The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between the participation in corporate volunteering activities within the context of Corporate Social Responsibilities and employee's affective commitment to the firm. For this purpose, a survey was administered to 132 people who work in various firms in order to measure their participation in corporate volunteering activities and affective commitment to the firm they currently work for. There are three scales in this research that have been utilized in order to measure the meaningfulness of the volunteering, the participation in volunteering and the affective commitment to the organization. The participants reside in Canada and the USA where the corporate volunteering activities are known to be very common and they are actively involved in some corporate volunteering activities through the organizations they work for. The survey was done in English and distributed via email and social media. The fact that the research is not restricted to people who work in one specific organization and that no personal or organizational information was requested presents significance in terms of obtaining truthful responses based on privacy. In conclusion of the study, the participation in volunteering activities has been found to have a positive relation with affective commitment of the employees, as well, the meaningfulness of the volunteering within CSR has been found to have a full mediation role in this relation. It is believed that the findings of this research will benefit those organizations who are planning to reach their strategic goals through corporate volunteering.