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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Työhyvinvoinnin paradoksit kolmannen sektorin palkkatyössä

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In recent years, the institutional environment of Finland’s third sector has undergone major changes. One consequence of that has been paid work becoming more important in organizing third sector activities. However, empirical evidence detailing how much paid work has actually grown and what that means for employee well-being is rare. Therefore, this dissertation studies how paid work has increased in the Finnish third sector while also examining the situation of Finland’s third sector employee well-being in comparison to public and private sector employees. Moreover, the dissertation analyzes the factors that create and reduce third sector employee well-being. Based on Statistic Finland’s register data, paid work has increased by nearly seventy percent in the third sector since the mid-1990s. The growth was fast until the twenty-first century. Thereafter, paid work started to decrease slightly in service providing organizations but continued to grow in the more traditional sectors of voluntary and charity activities. Nevertheless, despite the growing importance of third sector paid labour, the third sector working environment has been found to not support employee well-being to the fullest extent. By using two quantitative datasets – one collected in 2011 among third sector employees and the Finnish Working Condition Surveys (FWCS) from 2008 and 2013 – it was possible to show that third sector working environment creates high work engagement, but simultaneously generates problems with regard to job quality. This dissertation claims that these paradoxes – high work engagement but low job quality – mainly arise because of the third sector’s long tradition of organizing work through voluntary activities. In essence, the ideological nature of the work provides employees with high work engagement but, at the same time, the third sector’s organizational culture is not designed to manage paid work. Thus, while it gives employees an abundance of autonomy, it is not clearly structured, which is why it is so intensive and unpredictable. Consequently, employees face problems in balancing work and family life and their turnover intentions are high.