Antecedents
Early research regarding the antecedents of OCB focused on employee attitudes, dispositions, and leader supportiveness. More recently, many different variables have been examined in the effort to determine the antecedents of OCB. Commonly studied antecedents of OCB are job satisfaction, perceptions of organizational justice, organizational commitment, personality characteristics, task characteristics, and leadership behavior. These antecedents have been analyzed at both the overall and individual OCB levels.
One of the most intuitive antecedents of OCB is job satisfaction. Organ and Ryan (1995) conducted a meta-analysis of 28 studies and found a modest relationship between job satisfaction and OCB. This relationship was stronger than the relationship between job satisfaction and in-role performance. Other attitudinal measures, perceived fairness, organizational commitment, and leader supportiveness are found to correlate with OCB at about the same rate as satisfaction (Organ & Ryan, 1995).
In terms of personality characteristics, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and positive and negative affectivity garner the most support as antecedents of OCB (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000). Conscientiousness, in particular, has been found to have a strong relationship with the general compliance component of OCB (Organ et al., 2006). However, it has also been reported that personality measures are weaker predictors of OCB when compared to attitudinal predictors (Organ & Ryan, 1995).
Task characteristics such as feedback, routinization, and intrinsic satisfaction are found to be significantly related to altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, and civic virtue. Positive relationships were found between both task feedback and intrinsic satisfaction and OCB, while a negative relationship was found between task routinization and OCB. Even though task characteristics have been found to predict OCB, some debate exists as to whether this is a direct effect or a relationship mediated by job satisfaction (Todd & Kent, 2006).
Leadership behaviors have also been found to be an important predictor of OCB. These behaviors fall into four categories: transformational leadership behavior, transactional leadership behavior, behaviors having to do with the path-goal theory of leadership, and behaviors having to do with the leader-member exchange theory. Transformational leadership behaviors, including articulating a vision, providing an appropriate model, fostering the acceptance of group goals, high performance expectations, and intellectual stimulation, have significant positive relationships with Organ’s dimensions of OCB. Two types of behaviors representative of transactional leadership style, contingent reward behavior and non-contingent punishment behavior, have significant relationships with Organ’s dimensions of OCB. Additionally, both the supportive leadership and leader role clarification aspects of the path-goal theory of leadership are positively related to OCB. Podsakoff et al. (2000) found that leader-member exchange was positively related to altruism and an overall composite measure of OCB.
Read more about this topic: Organizational Citizenship Behavior
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