A double-edged sword of prosocial motivation: the influence of perceived leader and team prosocial motivation on rescue volunteers’ work engagement and job burnout

Emergency service volunteers face extraordinary challenges that undermine their well-being. Central to navigating these challenges is prosocial motivation – the drive to benefit others. While past research has identified antecedents of volunteers’ prosocial motivation, less is known about how social cues from leaders and peers shape this motivation in high-stakes settings. This study focuses on perceived leader prosocial motivation and perceived team prosocial motivation. Drawing on self-determination theory, we further distinguish between pleasure-based and pressure-based prosocial motivations and examine their influence on volunteers’ work engagement and job burnout. Survey data from 476 rescue volunteers across 50 charitable organisations in Thailand reveal that both perceived leader and team prosocial motivations increase engagement and reduce burnout through pleasure-based prosocial motivation. However, perceived team prosocial motivation also increases burnout via pressure-based prosocial motivation. These findings advance scholarship on the bright and dark sides of prosocial motivation – and the broader construct of public service motivation (PSM) – by showing that prosocial motivation is not always a uniformly positive force. The study moves beyond viewing prosocial motivation as a single, positive construct by distinguishing between its autonomous and controlled forms, linking them to both positive and negative well-being outcomes in high-stakes volunteer service.