Abstract
Amid the increasing demand for self-governing organizations in Japan’s hilly and mountainous areas, the government has implemented the community support staff system, in which local governments are responsible for supporting self-governing organizations. This comparative case study on three local governments in Hyogo prefecture shows that community support staff are highly committed to their assignments without regard to payment. We also find significant relationships between the community support system’s design and staff activities. The study employs two axes (task-orientation and volunteer-orientation) to characterize the system’s design, revealing that community support staff do not always find their activities rewarding and consider their management system to be poorly organized, indicating that further efforts are needed to communicate the importance of the system.
