The trust in volunteers versus paid workers: An experimental study

Previous research has shown that clients have a higher affect-based trust in volunteers compared to paid workers (Hoogervorst, Metz, Roza, & van Baren, 2016). However, it is still not clear how people trust volunteers and paid... [ view full abstract ]

Previous research has shown that clients have a higher affect-based trust in volunteers compared to paid workers (Hoogervorst, Metz, Roza, & van Baren, 2016). However, it is still not clear how people trust volunteers and paid workers in other dimensions such as competence. It has been suggested that paid workers are often perceived as more professional and competent (Netting, Huber, Borders, Kautz, & Nelson, 2000; Hoogervorst et al., 2016). Would people trust more in paid workers than volunteers on their competence especially for high-skilled services? The present research was set out to investigate if and how people’s trust in volunteers and paid workers differs in other dimensions as well as with different service types.

With a 2 (worker type: volunteer vs. paid worker)×2 (service type: high-skilled vs. low-skilled) between-subject design, we conducted a survey experiment in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Four different versions of scenarios were designed, varying in whether the service was provided by volunteers or paid workers, and whether the service was high-skilled (i.e., shorthand) or low skilled (i.e., reception). The well-known organization trust measurement with three dimensions of perceived competence, perceived benevolence and perceived honesty was adapted as dependent variables and separately analyzed in the current research. We hypothesized that participants would in general perceive more benevolence from volunteers than from paid worker, but for high-skilled services, participants would perceive more competence of paid workers than volunteers. 200 graduate students were recruited online through wechat (a whatsapp-like smartphone application with social networking function), and randomly divided into four groups. Each group of participants were asked to read one scenario and answer the following questions in 9-point scales.

As expected, the results showed that participants perceived higher benevolence from volunteers than from paid workers. However, no difference was found on perceived competence as well as perceived honesty between paid workers and volunteers for either high-skilled services or low-skilled services. In addition, it was found that participants perceived higher competence, higher benevolence and higher honesty of both volunteers and paid workers when they provided low-skilled services in comparison to high-skilled services. The present results suggest that regardless of service type, people’ trust in volunteers and paid workers only differs in the perception of their benevolence, which is consistent with previous findings that clients have a higher affect-based trust in volunteers than paid workers, but not in the perception of their competence and honesty. Implications and limitations of the present study are discussed.