Volunteers and resource management competencies of nonprofit organizations during challenging times

Nonprofit organizations increasingly compete for limited resources and recognize volunteers as vital assets. That said, which nonprofits are more successful in harnessing volunteers than others and enlisting more volunteers while responding to environmental changes? Guided by the resource-based theory, this study theorizes that a nonprofit's human, social, and financial resource management competencies relate to its volunteer use. Also, applying contingent resource-based theory extends our theoretical arguments as to why a nonprofit needs to develop its resource management competencies for the use of volunteers facing a community's financial hardship. Our zero-inflated negative binomial analysis using the IRS 990 and U.S. Census data (2010–2012) finds that (1) a nonprofit's higher human, social, and financial resource management competencies have an important influence on using volunteers, and (2) a nonprofit having higher financial resource management competencies can use more volunteers when its community experiences economic hardship. These findings pinpoint that volunteer use is not separable from organizational holistic resource management competencies and suggest that turbulent environments can cause a significant shift in the management competencies required for volunteer use.