A study of examining motivation, job satisfaction, and intention to continue volunteering of the volunteers of the 2011 Fubon Taipei Marathon Running Sporting Event in Taiwan

Many sporting events rely largely on volunteers to perform a variety of functions within their organizations. It is important for event managers or organizers to understand volunteer motivation, job satisfaction, and intention to continue volunteering, as well as to understand how to recruit potential and repeat volunteers and to improve volunteer retention to help ensure the continuation of the sporting events.;The present study was to examine volunteers' motivation, job satisfaction, and intention to continue volunteering at the marathon running sporting event. The target population for this study focused on sport volunteers who worked in 2011 Fubon Taipei Marathon Running Sporting Event in Taiwan. With about 600 volunteers involved, data was collected via paper-based survey questionnaires. Three hundred and five surveys were collected, 14 of those 305 were discarded because they were not completed, leaving 291 subjects remaining as useable. The response rate was 48.5% for this survey.;Statistical analyses included descriptive statistical studies, independent t-test, one-way-ANOVA, Pearson correlation, and multiple regression analysis (stepwise regression) were conducted to analyze the relationship among selected demographic characteristics, motivation, job satisfaction, and intention to continue volunteering.;The result showed, the volunteers' Person Growth and Community Involvement of motivational factors, Nature of Work of job satisfaction factor, and job satisfaction itself were statistical significant variables that predict volunteers' intention to continue volunteering for future events. In terms of intention, descriptive statistics showed that over 85% volunteers would likely to continue volunteering.;In addition, the results also revealed that there were significantly differences between demographic characteristics with seven motivational factors, and six job satisfaction factors. The results of the study suggest that event managers of sport organizations should recruit a diverse group of individuals using different recruiting strategies and marketing promotions to appeal to potential volunteers and repeat volunteers. Event organizers should understand the needs of volunteers in order to design and plan job assignments to achieve their mission of the volunteers. Furthermore, government sectors should build a platform for sport volunteers to store and organize this kind of data. Having a data based platform and understanding volunteer motivations, job satisfaction and different group needs, may help event managers and sport organizations to truly understand where and how to recruit different kinds of volunteers for different kinds of sporting events.