Who helps and why? Contextualizing organizational citizenship behavior.

Employees use organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) to achieve different functions: some OCB reflects altruistic motivations to help one’s organisation or coworkers, and some OCB reflects self-serving impression management motivations. Across 2 samples (Ns = 191 and 189), we contextualize functional (i.e., goal-directed) OCB with respect to dispositional and situational factors. Other-serving OCB was more common among employees higher on Honesty-Humility, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness, and in workplaces with transformational (intrinsically motivating) leaders and low perceptions of politics. In contrast, all forms of self-serving OCB (i.e., OCB for impression management purposes) were more common among employees low in Honesty-Humility, and some forms of self-serving OCB were more common in more political workplaces (high perceptions of politics). These findings extend the theoretical and practical benefits of a functional approach to OCB, where employees use OCB to achieve different goals—namely, to serve or to receive recognition—within different social and material reward systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)
Source: Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research