Antecedents and Consequences of Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB)

Abstract

Organizations want and need employees who will do those things that aren’t in any job description. And the evidence indicates that those organizations that have such employees outperform those that don’t. As a result, some human subject studies are concerned with organizational citizenship behavior as a dependent variable. Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) means individual behaviors that are beneficial to the organization but not directly recognized by the formal reward system. Though there are research studies that provide the domain of OCB and its effects on the organizational performance but they have varied viewpoints and are inadequate. The present paper is an effort towards this direction. The main objective of the paper is to build grounding for analyzing the impact of OCB on various organizational performance measures through various propositions based on antecedents and consequences of organizational citizenship behavior. The authors have described the antecedents of OCB from comprehensive perspective, which include role clarity, leadership, organizational commitment, organizational justice and individual traits. The impact of these antecedents is correlated with five organizational performance parameters namely reduced turnover, reduced absenteeism, employee satisfaction and loyalty, consumer satisfaction and consumer loyalty. The paper also stressed on the need to asses the influence of age, gender and experience on OCB, which have been the main lacunae in the existing literature on OCB. Moreover, the present paper proposed an endeavor to incorporate three dimensions viz: age, gender and experience to assess their influence on OCB.

Keywords: Citizenship Behaviors, Organizational Effectiveness, Organizational Behaviour Research