Giving Your All: Evaluating Changing Social Identities Throughout the Assimilation Process in Full-Life Volunteer Organizations

Abstract

The present study evaluates the assimilation process for full-life volunteers in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) missionary program. The focus on full-life volunteers provided an opportunity to observe the assimilation process for volunteers for whom their volunteer identity becomes the dominant identity in their lives for the duration of their service. The first research question addressed the assimilation process of these full-life volunteers. By examining the assimilation process of full-life volunteers through the lens of SIT, this study explores how individual full-life volunteers experience the assimilation process and the identity changes associated with organizational identification. Although much of the assimilation process for full-life volunteers conformed to previous assimilation phase models, several important differences were discovered. First, the results demonstrated that for full-life volunteers in this study, the anticipatory socialization phase is broken into three distinct phases: exposure, exploration, and engagement. Congruent with other assimilation phase models, the entry phase was marked by high levels of uncertainty and anxiety. Unique to full-life volunteers, the entry phase was not merely an entry into a new organization, but into an entirely new lifestyle that was centered on organizational membership. As participants became accustomed to the full-life volunteer lifestyle and role, they transitioned into the metamorphosis phase where their organizational and role identities became more solidified in the center of their self-concept. In the exit phase, full-life volunteers’ organizational and role identities became the foundational identities to which other congruent identities were added so as to create a new self-concept. The results of the second research question sought to describe how these full-life volunteers used sensemaking to frame their volunteer service. The results indicated that these volunteers made sense of their experience in three ways: transcendence, a rite of passage, and an opportunity for personal development. Through these sensemaking tools, full-life volunteers were able to find meaning in their service.