23-37.509.191 Volunteer Resource Management

Course offering details

Instructors: Dr. Jurgen Willems

Event type: Lecture

Displayed in timetable as: 23-37.509

Hours per week: 2

Credits: 6,0

Language of instruction: English

Min. | Max. participants: 10 | 41

Comments/contents:
<Important: The full course will be in English (teaching, exercises, course material and examination)>
THE EXAM WILL BE A WRITTEN EXAM IN THE LAST SESSION ON 7 MAY 2019
 
If you are interested to follow this course, please register at STiNE, in order to receive further updates and additional information.
 

Objectives of the course

This course focusses on the management of voluntary resources. Managing paid employees in traditional settings has been studied and taught from many perspectives and for different contexts. However, when we look at situations where it is not always possible to incentivize people with tangible rewards, often more creative and interpersonal management approaches have to be applied. Therefore, it is interesting to look at volunteers in nonprofit organizations to get a better insight in how people can be managed and motivated beyond the ‘traditional’ impact of tangible rewards.

Nonprofit organizations have very often to deal with complex management challenges, because many nonprofit organizations (1) have multiple goals, (2) share goals with other organizations, (3) have subjective outcomes, and (4) involve various stakeholders with different interests. In addition, they can rely on voluntary resources which require a special management approach.

As a result, we will start in this course from this nonprofit and volunteer complexity to get insight in several multifaceted management challenges. However, learning points go beyond the strict boundaries of volunteers and nonprofit organizations. By discussing specific challenges in these domains we will touch upon several practical themes:

 

How are people motivated for voluntary action (e.g. when no salary is given)?
How are expectations of different types of stakeholders adjusted towards each other?
How are expectations of collaborators managed and dealt with?
How do the mission, vision and strategy of an organization attracts (or pushes of) new people?
How can group cohesion in teams be managed
… and other issues.


 No prior knowledge is necessary regarding statistics or mathematics.


Content

The content of the course will be divided in two parts. The first part focusses on creating a strong mental reference framework for students on the complexity of the respective management challenges. With this reference framework students will be provided with the most relevant elements to make sound management decisions in this area. For example, we will dig into the psychological, sociological and economic perspectives of volunteering, and with the complexity stemming from multiple goals or multiple stakeholder groups.

With this general background, we will in the second and major part of the course deal with some particular management challenges. In this context we will deal with:


Attract people to engage them in voluntary action and in pro-social behavior.
Managing and building group cohesion for better team performance.
Optimizing an organization’s talent management strategy towards volunteer collaborator?
Volunteer satisfaction improvement to enhance volunteer commitment and efforts.
Necessary conditions that should be fulfilled in order to keep people motivated (avoiding volunteer burn-out)
Rewarding and recognizing volunteer efforts beyond financial incentives



Examination

Examination will happen with a written exam (60~90 minutes).

 
Looking forward to see you all in class! And please contact me for further questions (jurgen.willems@uni-hamburg.de)
 

With the best regards,

 

Jurgen Willems

Appointments
Date From To Room Instructors
1 Mon, 8. Apr. 2019 16:00 20:00 ESA AS-Saal Dr. Jurgen Willems
2 Mon, 15. Apr. 2019 16:00 20:00 ESA AS-Saal Dr. Jurgen Willems
3 Fri, 26. Apr. 2019 16:00 20:00 ESA AS-Saal Dr. Jurgen Willems
4 Tue, 30. Apr. 2019 16:00 20:00 ESA AS-Saal Dr. Jurgen Willems
Exams in context of modules
Module (start semester)/ Course Exam Date Instructors Compulsory pass
HRM_WPe Modul Aktuelle Themen und Instrumente des HRM (SuSe 14) / HRM_WPe  Volunteer Resource Management 20  Written examination Mon, 6. May 2019, 16:00 - 17:30 Dr. Jurgen Willems Yes
21  Written examination Tue, 24. Sep. 2019, 14:00 - 15:30 Dr. Jurgen Willems Yes
Course specific exams
Description Date Instructors Mandatory
1. Written examination Mon, 6. May 2019 16:00-17:30 Dr. Jurgen Willems Yes
Class session overview
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
Instructors
Dr. Jurgen Willems