The Impact of Trustworthiness in Non-Profit Organizations on the Altruistic Behavior: The Role of Attitudes Toward Transparency

Background/Purpose: Altruistic behavior is a concept that encompasses volunteer activities and donations and is a factor that influences non-profit organizations' management. In Korea, altruistic citizenship behavior is affected by social problems such as income polarization, labor-management conflict, and gender issues. As competition and conflicts have intensified, the interest in altruistic citizenship behavior is emerging. Recently, negative articles regarding non-profit organizations(NPOs) are exacerbating NPOs’ Trustworthiness; however, the recovery of NPOs' Trustworthiness has become a significant issue in Korea's non-profit sector. In this context, the study questions that NPOs’ trustworthiness is closely related to volunteering, donation, and helping others. Furthermore, the study focused on attitudes toward transparency as a moderating variable to assess the buffering factor of donation behavior. Notwithstanding, previous studies solely discussed the relationship between the reliability of NPOs and donations. Most previous studies lacked researching altruistic citizenship behavior from a multidimensional perspective. Therefore, the following study aims to ascertain the relationship between trustworthiness in NPOs and altruistic behavior while moderating citizens' perceived trustworthiness.

Methods: Data and Samples: The data from 2,006 adults aged 19 or older in The Beautiful Foundation’s 2020 Giving Korea survey were used for hierarchical regression analysis.

Measures : The trustworthiness of a non-profit organization was measured by a single item, “How much do you trust non-profit organizations?”. Altruistic Behavior was measured by 7 items, how often 'volunteer activities', 'donation', 'blood or plasma donation', ‘Providing in-kind or service’, ‘Giving cash to someone you know personally in need’, ‘Emotional support’, ‘Providing help to strangers’ were made during the year. The attitudes toward transparency was measured by 9 items. It asked what activities citizens do to judge the transparency of non-profit organizations (e.g., checking information such as finance, operation management, protection of personal information, Etc.). Those were all measured on the Likert scale, and the higher the score, the more do it.

Results: First, the higher the trustworthiness of non-profit organizations, the more altruistic behavior is performed. Second, it was found that the attitudes toward transparency significantly adjusted the relationship between the trustworthiness of non-profit organizations and altruistic behavior. In other words, it was found that the higher the trust in a non-profit organization(+) is, the more altruistic behavior was performed(+), as the attitudes toward transparency was actively collected(+).

Conclusions and Implications: This study confirmed that the trustworthiness of non-profit organizations has a positive effect on altruistic behavior. This serves as a basis for establishing social welfare strategies to promote altruistic behavior. Also, it shows that trustworthiness and transparency can be a strategy to enhance NPOs management. Lastly, this study is expected to provide a solution to social problems, such as increasing altruistic behavior, providing a clue to transforming society in a positive direction.