The People Approach to Volunteer Work Design

In the 1970s, many in volunteer management were concerned with making the field more professional by adopting and adapting personnel practices from private business.  Ivan Scheier believed this was not only wrong-headed but almost the opposite of what we should be doing.  Instead, Ivan preferred and promoted a way to develop roles for volunteers that he called “The People Approach.”  In this article, Rick Lynch explores the application of Ivan's People Approach to designing roles for volunteers in the present-day world.