Personality Characteristics of Community Mental Health Volunteers: a Review

Volunteer Work and Well-Being

“…Interestingly, helpfulness was associated with other positive personality characteristics such as dominance, self-efficacy, confidence, and feelings of competence (Penner and Finkelstein 1998). Relatedly, in a literature review of the personality characteristics of community mental health volunteers, Allen and Rushton (1983) concluded that volunteer participation was higher for individuals with an internal locus of control, with higher selfesteem, and with greater emotional stability. Such results hint that people who generally have greater personal coping resources (e.g., high self-esteem or an internal locus of control) and who are in better mental health might be more likely to volunteer.…”

Confidence in Charitable Institutions and Volunteering

“…Personality variables include such things as internal locus of control, empathy, morality, emotional stability, and self-esteem (Allen & Rushton, 1983). Here we run into another identification problem due to feedback effects, because it is plausible that volunteering builds self-esteem and perhaps other personality traits, as well.…”

All in the Mind? Psychological, Social, and Religious Predictors of Civic Volunteerism among Churchgoers in England

“…Positive relationships between volunteering and extraversion were evident in early studies of volunteerism (Allen & Rushton, 1983;Smith & Nelson, 1975) and in a few recent studies that have used the Big Five model of personality, though the effects were sometimes weak (Bekkers, 2005), and may have been mediated by variables related to how strongly motivated subjects were to engage in prosocial behavior (Carlo, Okun, Knight, & Guzman, 2005). We predict from theory and previous research a positive correlation between the extraversion scale and civic participation.…”

“…Volunteering is seen as evidence of a wider tendency to prosocial behavior, which has been studied in a variety of ways (Bierhoff, 2001). A number of studies have used personality or other psychological models to examine volunteering or prosocial behavior (Allen & Rushton, 1983;Bekkers, 2005;Carlo, Allen, & Buhman, 1999;Cohen, Vigoda, & Samorly, 2001;Dovidio, Piliavin, Schroeder, & Penner, 2006;Erez, Mikulincer, van Ijzendoorn, & Kroonenberg, 2008;Musick & Wilson, 2003;Penner & Finkelstein, 1998). A common personality model used in these studies is the Big Five personality inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1985).…”