PROFESSIONAL BURNOUT OF VOLUNTEERS IN THE SOCIAL SECTOR: WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES IN HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT?

Abstract

The research carried out has the advantage of proposing a conceptual model of situations generating professional burnout among volunteers working in the social sector. Our study is based on a case study which combines secondary data with a lexical analysis conducted from a corpus formed by 24 interviews. Our results show four situations that generate professional burnout including night work leading to the street during marauding, “back office” organization, “front office” activities as well as investment in consulting. of administration. In the first situation, volunteers suffer from a lack of resources, organizational problems, a feeling of ineffectiveness and face risky situations. In the second perspective, individuals talk about work overload linked to loyalty problems, the feeling of losing the meaning of their actions and feeling weakened by the decisions made. The third group feels disappointed by the quality of social ties, finds themselves considered employees with the same level of responsibility and believes that there are security problems. Finally, volunteer administrators encounter difficulties in reconciling their personal life with their associative investment, become exhausted due to a lack of suitable tools and regret their lack of professionalism in dealing with the “performance” challenges required by funding partners, including public authorities.