Industrial & Organizational Psychology

Industrial & Organizational Psychology

Overview of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB)

In order to delineate the current conceptualization of the OCB construct, the more general area of organizational helping behaviors and then trace the evolution of the OCB construct. The constructs underlying and associated with OCB have a very long history.

As early as 1938, Barnard theorized about the“informal organization” and the idea that employees must cooperate for the good of the overall organization. Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939) also discussed cooperation, which they defined as spontaneous pro-social behaviors often performed by individuals that assist others with work-related needs. In the 1960s, cooperation continued to be a topic of interest. Cooperative behaviors that extend beyond formal role requirements, noting that they have an important influence on organizational functioning.

Several researchers have discussed the muddled state of the literature on organizational helping behavior noting that terms such as pro-social organizational behavior (POB), OCB, and contextual performance are often treated as synonymous. However, some researchers note that conceptualization of OCB is the 5 oldest and most researched conceptualization of workplace helping behaviors in the extant literature (Barnard, 1938).

Organizational citizenship behavior

Originally, OCB was thought to fall outside traditional conceptualizations of job performance, as it was behavior that was not prescribed or required for a specific job. In its original state, OCB was comprised of two dimensions:

1) Altruism, which was defined as helping behavior directed toward specific individuals (e.g., helping new employees get oriented, helping others with large workloads) and

2) Generalized compliance, which was defined as impersonal conscientious behavior that helps others in the organization, including following rules, norms, and expectations (e.g., being punctual, not wasting time).

OCB was considered to be directed toward the social interworking of organizations. Two important points related to this early conceptualization of OCB are that it was considered to be

1) extra-role and

2) Unrewarded,

Although Smith et al. (1983) did note that OCB was often noticed by supervisors and therefore could influence subjective performance evaluations. The researchers developed an assessment of their two proposed citizenship dimensions i.e., altruism and generalized compliance (Smith, et. al., 1983)

Organ (1988) later expanded on this conceptualization of OCB by adding three dimensions to the original construct. These were civic virtue, organizational courtesy, 6 and sportsmanship. Civic virtue is employee involvement in the political working of an organization (e.g., attending important meetings). Organizational courtesy involves employee behaviors that ward off potential problems (e.g., informing supervisors of impending situations to ensure they are handled appropriately). Finally, sportsmanship is a lack of complaining about work conditions (Organ, 1988).

Citizenship performance

Coleman and Borman (2000) attempted to further understand the contextual performance domain and, in the process, repackaged and renamed it as citizenship performance. They asked I/O psychologists to separate citizenship performance behaviors into clusters and used several analytical techniques (i.e., factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis) to determine the underlying structure of the construct. Their results indicated three dimensions of citizenship performance. First, interpersonal citizenship performance is behavior that 10 promotes the interests ...