Worker involvement in entrepreneurial nonprofit organizations. Toward a new assessment of workers’ perceived satisfaction and fairness.

Exploiting a unique data set created in 1998 on a sample of 228 public, nonprofit and for-profit organizations working in the social service sector, and on 2066 workers, the paper seeks to demonstrate that workers’ satisfaction and loyalty to the organization is influenced by the incentive mixes offered by different organizational forms. Nonprofit organizations are found to give more weight to intrinsic and relational aspects of the work than to monetary aspects. They tend to pay lower wages and to produce a mix of incentives based on non-monetary rewards compared to public bodies and for-profit enterprises. The role of distributive and procedural fairness will be investigated as well. Fairness emerges as a crucial factor which influences both satisfaction and loyalty. Besides this general result, procedural justice is found to be the most important determinant of workers’ general satisfaction with their jobs.