For the sake of…. What?

This master thesis is an investigation of motives of the volunteers in art museums. Volunteers play an important role in the activities of many art museums. However, volunteers differ from paid employees, first of all by their motives to support the museum. In a situation when monetary pay, the most potent motivator for regular staff, is inapplicable, standard human resources approach may be ineffective. To understand how the volunteers can be better managed it is important to make clear what are their motives to work for a museum without direct financial rewards. Previous research have produced different classifications of volunteer motives, however, not many researchers have focused on the museum volunteers specifically, though there are reasons to believe that these volunteers are different from voluntary employees in other sectors. Moreover, the important concept of intrinsic motivation has hardly been applied to volunteers, especially in museums. This paper is aimed to fill this gap. Taxonomy of museum volunteer motives was developed on the basis of existent literature, with the emphasis on division of the complex of motives into two main categories of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. The research was conducted using quantitative research strategy with the cross-sectional research design. It was carried-out by means of online and offline questionnaires among the 94 volunteers from 16 art museums in the Netherlands. The results of this research have shown that volunteers in the art museums in the Netherlands are predominantly motivated by the intrinsic types of motivation: interest in the art and altruistic considerations. However, the social motivational aspect also manifested itself to be of importance among the sample.