Athletes Need To Direct Financial Benefits Of Volunteering

Successful sports events rely upon the effectiveness and reliability of volunteers (Farrell, Johnston, & Twynam, 1998; Giannoulakis, Wang, & Gray, 2007). The cost of volunteer hours, if paid, would amount to bankruptcy of the event organisers, and sports events would not be financially feasible. When mega-events like the Olympics always run into debt, reasons for hosting multisport events are usually not for direct financial benefits. Other tangible gains can be made as result of hosting sport events, such as, home advantage for their athletes, attraction of athletes to acclimatise to the environment prior to the sports event, increased tourism as a result of the events, public awareness of the sports and the athletes, as well as political

Overall, volunteering among Finnish population has increased (Official Statistics of Finland, 2009), making it more easier for organisers to find volunteers. However, the background of the volunteers is also diverse. Therefore, it is essential that volunteers attend training to know more about the roles during the events. There are a variety of roles that volunteers fulfil, some of them work directly with athletes at the competition sites, outside of the competition sites, such as food, accommodation and transportation, and some volunteers mainly interact with the general public. As a result, training needs to be broad, but also specific to meet the needs of the volunteers’ limited time to come to the training sessions. Arranging and preparing training can be a task-intensive activity for organisers, particularly at a time, when much of the focus is on organising the logistics of the event. Volunteers that take part in disability sports events may require training regarding specific disability

Volunteer efficacy is an important construct for volunteers to complete their job satisfactory, and to have the willingness to continue and volunteer again (Cuskelly, Taylor, Hoye, & Darcy, 2006). Based on the premise of Self-efficacy Theory, there are four tenants for increasing self-efficacy; mastery, verbal persuasion, vicarious experiences and physiology (Bandura, 1977). One key component of volunteer efficacy is the mastery accomplishments, that is, the way to carry out the necessary tasks. Another important source of volunteer efficacy is the verbal persuasion, or in this case the social support of others during the event. The second strongest source of volunteer efficacy is based on the past experiences, in this case, for novel volunteers, their past experience would be minimum, while people who have volunteers for several events, have their ability to use the past to help inform their decisions in the present and in the