Identifying the Influencing Factors in the Retention of Intergenerational Volunteers in Charitable Organizations: A Case Study of Charitable Organizations in the City of Shiraz

Nowadays, non-governmental organizations, such as charities and citizen-based organizations, are operating in all countries with different purposes and shapes, and a large portion of their employee workforce consists of volunteers. Therefore, human resource management and concerns about the retention of human resources in these organizations are different from other organizations such as government agencies. The purpose of this qualitative study is to identify the effective factors in the retention of intergenerational volunteers in charitable organizations in the city of Shiraz. After interviewing 10 young and 10 middle-aged volunteers of 9 charities in Shiraz, selected by the judgmental sampling method, theoretical saturation in terms of sample size was obtained. In this study, semi-structured interview is used as data collection tool and data analysis was done by utilizing the theme analysis method. After reviewing and organizing interview transcriptions, the researcher identified the basic codes or concepts, and then similar codes were placed in special categories, each having a representing title. The identified data was classified and combined based on the degree of conceptual similarity, resulting in the extraction of 24 sub-themes and 5 main themes. The findings indicate that the main themes of motivation, human resource management, management and leadership, culture creation, and communication are effective factors in the retention of volunteers in both young and middle-aged generations, and the difference among these factors in the two generations was the importance of each of the main and sub-themes.