Organizational Citizenship Behaviour Traits: HR Perspective

Written by: Dr.Gandham Sri Rama Krishna

Published in Personnel Today, Kolkata, Quarterly Journal of  NIPM, October-December, 2014, Vol.XXXV, No.3, PP. 19-25. ISSN: 0970-8504.  

Abstract

Every person must be a responsible citizen in the society for development in this competitive world.  In the same way employees in the organisations must be citizen of the organisation for its growth and development. Employees must also exhibit their talent by their behaviour in going beyond the normal requirements in his role this behaviour is termed as  Organizational Citizenship Behaviours. It  is a workplace behavior that exceed one’s basic job requirements. Employees exhibit certain behaviours by going beyond the normal call of duty. Unless and until employees engage in the positive way and their behaviour will contributes to the organizational success. Organizational citizenship behaviour is employees’ extra efforts in the organization and it is discretionary acts by the employees. Organizational citizenship behaviours may come in the forms of loyalty, organizational compliance and organizations benefits.  Job satisfaction, and organizational commitment are some of the organizational citizenship behaviours.

Introduction   

In today's competitive and turbulent environment, it is imperative for organizations to build employee commitment to spur growth. Nowadays employees are exhibiting a certain behavior by going beyond the normal requirements of the role. Employees are very much interested in earning more income by doing something work. It is the duty of the employer to create healthy environment, so that the employees can perform their duties in an innovative way. This behaviour is termed as Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCB) and it has been found to meaningfully contribute to organizational growth   with increasing technological advantages. Innovation has become a part of competitive advantage.  

Organ (1988), defines OCB as “individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization.Organizational Citizenship Behaviour is employee behaviours that although not critical to the task or job, serve to facilitate organizational functioning.  

Organizational citizenship behavior is referred as set of discretionary workplace behaviours that exceed one’s basic job requirements. They are often described as behaviours that go beyond the call of duty.  Employees exhibit certain behaviors by going beyond the normal call of duty. These behaviors are called Organizational Citizenship Behaviours (OCB) and they contribute significantly to an organization's growth. When employers design roles for employees within an organization, the latter are not only motivated, but they also show high preference to OCB. Organizational Citizenship extent to which an employee’s voluntary support and behaviour contributes to the organization’s success.  (Organ,et al., 1995). Jobs have moved away from a clearly defined set of tasks and responsibilities and have evolved into much more ambiguous roles. Without a defined role, it quickly becomes difficult to define what is discretionary.

Organizations could not survive or prosper without their members behaving as good citizens by engaging in all sorts of positive behaviours. Organizational citizenship behaviour has been defined as a multi-dimensional concept that includes all positive organizationally  relevant behaviours of organisatinal members including traditional in-role behaviours, organizationally pertinent extra-role behaviours, and political behaviours, such as full and responsible organizational participation(Van Dyne, et.al., 1994).  

Positive employee voluntary behaviours like acting cooperatively, suggesting ways to improve the product, and promoting a positive climate. Organ,(1988) termed as OCB are manifested by the activities directed toward other members in the workplace or the organization, and may include helping co-workers, communicating new and critical information, maintaining a conscientious attitude toward the work environment, actively participating in decision processes and discussions. The main three types of behaviours are required for high organizational effectiveness: (i) people must join and remain in the organization (employee retention rate); (ii) employees must stick to the in-role behaviour which is performed in accordance with formal role descriptions; and (iii), extra-role behaviour which goes beyond the formal requirements of the role must be practiced (Katz & Kahn, 1966). The in-role behaviour expected of an employee is usually codified in job description or role requirement. However, for increased organizational effectiveness, the employees must also practice the extra-role and engage in cooperative behaviour which goes beyond what is stated in their role descriptions. OCB is a term used to describe such extra-role and employee cooperation.

The benefits of OCB is often recognised and rewarded by managerial staff, employees do not necessarily make the connection between performing OCB and reward gain and do not expect rewards (Organ, 1997). Given that OCB has such a significant impact on the productivity and efficiency of the organisation, and workers do not expect to be reimbursed for their efforts. OCB should be considered an efficient way of improving organisational profitability and reducing cost and lowering rates of absenteeism and employee turnover. At the same time it increases employee performance and wellbeing, as cooperative employees  are more productive, and OCB enhances the social environment in the workplace. OCB can enhance productivity (helping new co-workers; helping colleagues meet deadlines) OCB can free up resources like autonomous, cooperative employees give managers more time to clear their work; helpful behaviour facilitates. OCB can attract and retain good employees, through creating and maintaining a friendly, supportive working environment. OCB can create social capital, better communication and stronger networks facilitate accurate information transfer and improve efficiency.

Organisational Citizenship(OC) and Corporate Citizenship(CC)

The HR management literature have investigated the notion of citizenship from an organizational perspective with the organizational citizenship behaviours (OCB) construct, and from a social perspective with the notion of corporate citizenship (CC). While OCB focuses on the efforts undertaken by employees to behave as good citizens within their organization, CC designates the initiatives undertaken by businesses to act responsibly in society.

OCB as short-term behaviours: employees help their organization by displaying behaviours such as being punctual, not taking extra-long breaks, or helping someone in need of immediate assistance.   Graham’s (1991) indicators of OCB reflect “loyalty and participation dimensions have longer term effects”. Loyalty builds support for the organization among important external constituency groups and participation may help the organization adapt to its environment and may lead to changes in the organizational structure. Since the organizational structure and image are involved, these behaviours have much longer term implications and results than those proposed by Organ (1988).

The behaviours characterizing good CC have been investigated under various labels: corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship. Businessmen have the obligation to pursue desirable policies in terms of societal objectives and values.  Businesses have the economic responsibility of being profitable and by producing goods and services that society wants. They have to follow the rules of behaviour considered as appropriate by legal and ethical   responsibilities. Firms are also expected to participate in the improvement of society beyond the minimum standards set by the economic, legal and ethical responsibilities.

Citizenship describes the status of belonging somewhere and it implies both rights and responsibilities (Graham,1991). OCB could be positioned as the organizational equivalent of citizen responsibilities and CC as citizen responsibilities of companies. Therefore, both OCB and CC call for behaviors of helpfulness dedicated to serve the common good and aimed at enhancing the quality of life in the community in which actors evolve. These behaviors can take the form of an active participation and involvement in the local environment, facilitating decisions for betterment, showing an interest in common affairs, helping others and respecting their rights. Furthermore, citizenship is based on the ideal of a constructive partnership between citizens and their community. (Swanson, 2001)

 Organizational Citizenship Behaviour and its Antecedents

Organizational citizenship behaviour is employees’ extra efforts which are not officially required by the organization and discretionary acts by employees (Kohan,2003). The two major components of OCB are compliance, which indicates employees’ intention to follow the organizational rules, and altruism, which means employees’ voluntary behaviours to help others and to work more. (Organ,1995).

Job attitudes, task variables, and various types of leader behaviours appear to be more strongly related to OCBs than the other antecedents. Job satisfaction, perceptions of fairness, and organizational commitment were positively related to citizenship behaviours. In addition to the four major categories of antecedents: employee characteristics, task characteristics, organizational characteristics, and leadership behaviours. Organizational citizenship behaviours come in a variety of forms such as loyalty, helping others, and organizational compliance and organizations benefit employees who are willing to contribute their efforts and abilities to the organizations even though that is not officially required of them. This contribution of organizational citizenship behaviour to organizations has received much attention in the business area (Todd, 2003).

Dimensions of OCB

Graham (1991) proposes a four dimensional OCB model. The dimensions are: (a) interpersonal helping; (b) individual initiative; (c) personal industry; and (d) loyal boosterish.

Further to Organ's and  Podsakoff identified five major categories of OCB— such as;(i) Altruism refers to the voluntary behaviours. It occurs when one employee aids another employee in completing his/her task under unusual circumstances. (ii) Conscientiousness refers to the extent of behaviours to which someone is punctual, high in attendance and goes beyond normal requirements or expectations.    (iii) Courtesy refers to behaviours that are aimed at preventing future problems. (iv) Civic virtue involves support for the administrative functions of the organization. It consists of those behaviours that are concerned with the political life of the organization, for example, attend meetings and express one's opinions in implementing a new policy. Civic virtue refers to employees’ commitment to the organization as a whole (Ackfeldt, 2005).  (v) Sportsmanship refers to maintaining a positive attitude by employees even when things go wrong or when there are minor setbacks, and their willingness to give up personal interests for the good of the organization by, for example, not complaining about trivial matters or not finding fault with other employees.

Organisational citizenship behaviour is a term that encompasses anything positive and constructive that employees do, of their own volition, which supports co-workers and benefits the company. Typically, employees who frequently engage in OCB may not always be the top performers (though they could be, as task performance is related to OCB), but they are the ones who are known to ‘go the extra mile’ or ‘go above and beyond’ the minimum efforts required to do a merely satisfactory job.(Deww Zhang,2011) Presently  organisations will benefit from encouraging employees to engage in OCB, because it has been shown to increase productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction, and reduce costs and rates of employee turnover and absenteeism (Podsakoff, et.al, 2009).

The traditional measures used as valid predictors of OCB include; job satisfaction, employee engagement, organizational commitment, motivation and the level of trust between an employee and his/her co-workers and supervisors. An umbrella term ‘morale’ has been coined to cover job satisfaction, perceived fairness, affective commitment and leader consideration and moral correlates with OCB.(Organ et al., 2006).

·        Job Satisfaction & OCB: Job satisfaction is the employees’ response on their work itself and work environment and is caused when one’s need is satisfied at the workplace. Regarding the definition of job satisfaction, Hopkins (1983) defined it as ‘the fulfilment or gratification of certain needs that are associated with one’s work’.

Locke (1983), who defined job satisfaction as a pleasure of positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job experience. Thus, understanding job satisfaction of employees is an important organisational goal.

The most consistent and strongest relationships were between OCB and satisfaction with supervision and promotions. Though OCB is a spontaneous initiative taken by staff. The correlations between OCB and job satisfaction is approximately 0.4 (Organ, 1988). There is empirical evidence for the widely-held belief that satisfied employees perform better, but this is correlation, not causal. However, certain types of performance – primarily those related to citizenship behaviour – will be affected by job satisfaction. Think of employees who are cooperative with their superiors and colleagues, willing to make compromises and sacrifices and are ‘easier to work with’, employees who ‘help out with the extra little things’ without complaining – these behaviours are all encompassed within OCB.

It is commonly accepted that job satisfaction is a contributing factor to the physical and mental well-being of the employees; therefore, it has significant influence on job-related behaviours such as productivity, and employee relations (Becker,2004).  

·        Organizational Commitment & OCB: Organizational commitment has been defined as an attitude involving employee loyalty to the organization with those individuals who are committed being willing to contribute something of themselves to their organization.(Smith & Hoy, 1992) Organizational commitment generally involves the internalization of organizational goals and values and to exert effort beyond that normally required in the interest of these goals and values. (Jans N.A,1989)

·        Employee Engagement & OCB: This could be because employees who engage in OCB are simply liked more and perceived more favourably or it may be due to more work-related reasons such as the manager’s belief that OCB plays a significant role in the organisation’s overall success, or perception of OCB as a form of employee engagement due to its voluntary nature (Organ et al., 2006). Since OCB is beneficial in every organisation, it is important to consider the factors which affect engagement in OCB in the workplace. The OCB have been broadly categorized into three areas: personality/trait, attitudinal, and leadership/group factors. The influence of personality on tendency to exhibit OCB is minimal; however it does mean that some staff will be more naturally inclined towards engaging in OCB than others. The other two categories are more promising, in that attitudes can be cultivated and leadership and group characteristics can be altered to facilitate staff engagement in OCB.

·        Performance and OCB: Most of the research on the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and performance has been conducted at the individual level. The effects on employee performance are threefold. Firstly, employees who engage in OCB tend to receive better performance ratings by their managers (Podsakoff et al., 2009). Regardless of the reason, the second effect is that a better performance rating is linked to gaining rewards – such as pay increments, bonuses, promotions or work-related benefits.

OCB may not always be directly and formally recognized or rewarded by the company, through salary increments or promotions for example, though of course OCB may be reflected in favourable supervisor and co-employee ratings, or better performance appraisals. In this way it can facilitate future reward gain indirectly. Finally, and critically, OCB must ‘promote the effective functioning of the organisation’.

HRM practices enhance employee performance by providing greater intrinsic motivation and opportunity to perform through higher levels of perceived job influence and discretion. OCB also encompasses organizational-related acts such as working overtime without remuneration, or volunteering to organise office-wide functions. OCB has been shown to have a positive impact on employee performance and wellbeing, and this in turn has noticeable flow-on effects on the organisation.

Currently, OCB is conceptualized as synonymous with the concept of contextual performance. While this reflects the flexible nature of employees’ roles in the modern workplace, and acknowledges the fact that employees do get recognized and rewarded for engaging in OCB. OCB has often been compared to contextual performance. It consists of four dimensions: persistence of enthusiasm, assistance to others, rule and proscribed procedure following, and openly defending the organizations objectives (Borman, 1993).

Contextual performance is defined as non-task related work behaviors and activities that contribute to the social and psychological aspects of the organization. OCB and contextual performance share their defining attributes as they both consist of behaviors other than those needed to perform the routine functions of the job. Both also require that these behaviors contribute to the overall success of the organization. Additionally, they also agree on the theme that these behaviors are discretionary and each employee chooses the amount and degree to which they will perform them. However, while contextual performance and OCB share a good part of their content domain, there are some important differences between the two constructs. One of the main requirements of OCBs is that they are not formally rewarded, which is not the case for contextual performance. OCBs may at some point encourage some sort of reward, but that these rewards would be indirect and uncertain. Also, contextual performance  does not require that the behavior be extra-role, only that it be non-task. The differences between contextual performance and OCB are slight and easy to miss, however, they do exist.

Prosocial organizational behavior(POB)

The concept of organizational citizenship behaviour appeared over two decades ago in the field of organizational behaviour. OCB has also been compared to prosocial organizational behaviour (POB). POB is defined as behaviour within an organization that is aimed at improving the welfare of another person (Brief & Motowidlo,1986). The important distinction here is that this type of behavior, unlike OCB, can be unrelated to the organization. Thus, someone exhibiting prosocial behaviour could be helping a co-employee  with personal matter.

Similarly to OCB, this concept emerged in response to the realization that only looking at job specific work behaviors ignored a significant portion of the job domain. Originally, experts in this field focused only on activities that directly supported the output of the organization. Organizational citizenship behaviours as “individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization.

Extra-Role Behaviour(ERB),is defined as “behavior that attempts to benefit the organization and that goes beyond existing role expectations” (Organ et al., 2006). While similar in many aspects, there do some important differences between OCB and ERB. These two interesting concepts are a part of ERB that are not included in OCB: whistle blowing  and principled organizational dissent.  

Encouraging OCB in the Workplace

The extent to which employees exhibit OCB is a function of ability, motivation and opportunity and promoting better relationships between supervisors and staff, and among staff in general.

These are some other tips to encourage OCB in the organizations; (a) Office social environment – a working environment that promotes or is conducive to employees demonstrating OCB. Encouraging staff to attend office functions or office-wide birthday lunches. (b) Supervisor awareness – training or educating management about OCB will make them more aware of employee. They may choose to include OCB in their performance appraisals, their own informal reward system to encourage OCB. (c) Hiring practices – though the impact of personality on OCB is small, an outgoing, attentive, enthusiastic employee with a positive outlook and ‘can do’ attitude will be more inclined to engage in OCB.                   (d) Habituatio -  if  OCB is rewarded regularly, you may find that OCB levels will rise across the organisation over time.  (e) Organizational Loyalty – may enhance the organization’s ability to attract good talent, self-development behavior may reduce organizational training expenses and improve work effectiveness.  (f)Leader behaviors – also appear to play a key role in determining OCBs. Other behaviors, like providing an appropriate model, may influence OCBs directly through social learning processes, because the leader models various types of citizenship behaviors. Still other leadership behaviors, such as contingent reward behavior, may have a direct impact on citizenship behaviors in workplace. (g) Cross-Cultural Context – may affect the strengths of the relationships between citizenship behavior and its antecedents and consequences for example, the moderating effects; and  the mechanisms through which citizenship behavior is generated, or through which it influences organizational success.  

Social Exchange Perspective

Social exchange provided a mechanism for the intuitive link between attitudes and performance. The relationship between an organization and its employees may be conceptualized as involving ‘Economic exchange’ or ‘Social exchange’. Economic exchange is based exclusively on a specific contractual relationship, requiring specific performance of contractual obligations, with no expectation of performance beyond the specified terms of the contract. Social exchange, however, involves imperfectly specified terms and a norm of reciprocity, such that discretionary benefits provided to the exchange partner are returned in a discretionary way in the longer term (Blau, 1964).  

Employment relationships may be seen as having the characteristics of social exchange. For example, organizational justice has been seen as providing the employer’s side of such an exchange, with employees reciprocating through high levels of discretionary OCB (Moorman, 1991).   

Other organizational inputs into the employment relationship have also been considered in a social exchange context. Wayne (1997) considered the quality of leader– member exchange as an input into a social exchange, and terms of employment may also be seen in this way.  

Conclusion

Job designing is very important to make jobs more work modules. Organizations should look at enriching roles for completeness rather than adding more responsibility to the employees who may term disparate. The employer by capturing employees’ expectations in terms   of responsibilities and employee empowerment by creating and alignment between organizational objectives and employees expectations. The employees should feel autonomy in discharging their duties and it will have direct bearing on productivity of employees. Autonomy leads to conscientiousness which will lead the higher engagement of employees to the organization. This is coupled with other  job characteristics at higher levels, will give rise to good organisational citizens.

Among the internal factors, the organizational citizenship behaviour traits are found to impact positively and organisational ability to create an innovation will be replicated in other departments of the organization. Both intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction are important variables in predicting the citizenship behaviours that can benefited. Therefore, priority should be given to both intrinsic and extrinsic variables that will encourage employees to be more spontaneous and willing to achieve the organisational goals even though they exceed their formal duties and responsibilities. OCB should be actively encourage for good performance and well being which will reflect in reduced costs and increased profitability  at the organizational levels.  

Corporate Citizenship (CC) designates the initiatives undertaken by businesses to act responsible in the society. Organisations must build employee commitment for its growth. The organizations must create a positive environment for the employees so that the behaviours will contribute to improve the quality of product and promote a positive work culture. Employees must join an organization not for the job sake but for involvement in the achievement of goals and values of the organization. It will show a positive impact on employee performance and wellbeing. OCB is one of the ways improving organizational profitability and reduce in the costs and lowering rates of absenteeism and employee turnover.  

Reference

• ·        Ackfeldt. A.L & Coote LV (2005), A study of OCB in a retail sitting, Journal of Business Research 58(2), 151-159, doi:10,1016/S0148-2963(3), 00110-3.