Why Insisting in Being Volunteers? A Practical Case Study Exploring from Both Rational and Emotional Perspectives

Abstract

This study explored the mechanism on how volunteers as rationalists use rationalism during their cognitive appraisal process when dealing with emotional events in their social helping behavior such as international rescue events. The authors used the triangulation method to include three studies (Study 1 is a qualitative research which explored ways of TCF leader’s inspiring their volunteer workers; Study 2 is a quantitative research on the decision-making process of volunteer individuals involving in international rescue activities; Study 3 is a quantitative research on individuals’ motivation for joining social helping behavior) for validation of Tzu Chi Foundation (TCF), which is a famous non-profit organization worldwide, to prove that volunteers as rationalists rely on the reasonable cognitive appraisal method to substantially evaluate the necessity of social helping behavior, including their emotional responses and arousals. Economic evaluation theory was used to depict volunteers as volunteers as rationalists’ way of cognitive appraisal perspective towards emotional events such as international rescue cases or when participating in activities by non-profit organizations. Accordingly, this study found that volunteers as rationalists adhere to the principles of altruism, egoism, compensation, and reciprocity as part of their cognitive appraisal when responding to emotional situations. The research findings of this study depicted the volunteers’ behavioral intention as volunteers as rationalists in responding to emotional events in the form of NPO helping behaviors and international rescue events. Social helping behaviors often rely on people’s emotional compassion and empathy at the beginning, but social helping behaviors cannot rely solely on emotional support. To create long-term support for non-profit organizations’ action plans, it is still neces-sary to plan rationally, turning the actions of volunteers into reasonable plans. In this way, even if the volunteers have experienced many difficulties during devotion, hindrance, and stress afterward, they can still keep in arationalist’ mindset continuously. This paper provided directions for volunteer training for non-profit organizations.