In a qualitative interview study, 20 Hong Kong Chinese informants were asked to report stories about colleagues who were either 'good soldiers' or 'good actors'. In stories about good soldiers, informants attributed their colleagues' organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) primarily to prosocial or pro-organizational motives. Informants' stories about good actors broke down into three major subcategories of citizenship-related impression management: OCB attributed primarily to impression management motives; alleged pseudo-OCB concomitant with minimal compliance; and alleged pseudo-OCB concomitant with counterproductive behaviour. When distinguishing good soldiers from good actors, informants adopted two criteria for attribution: wilful behavioural inconsistency, i.e. low generality of behaviour across contexts; and alleged false pretence, i.e. discrepancy between claims or allusions and actual deeds. Our findings partially supported a prior hypothesis from attribution theory, that consistency was a criterion for attribution, but indicated that consensus, i.e. correspondence between the focal colleague's behaviour and other employees' behaviour, failed to differentiate good soldiers from good actors. Informants generally regarded OCB as socially desirable only when it was attributed primarily to prosocial/pro-organizational motives. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.

By focusing on citizenship and ethics, organizations can become more adaptable to turbulent conditions. Expansion of the service sector, globalization and greater strategic emphasis on technological innovation and 'intrapreneurship' are among the trends that have given rise to major changes in the nature of work, the workplace and the workforce [1]. The current business environment may be characterized as ' hyper-turbulent' and resource constrained, relentlessly confronting organizations and their managers with challenging, unpredictable high-stakes issues and dilemmas in various areas such as environmental sustainability, accountability, transparency, consumer and human rights, discrimination, fraud and bribery. Such turbulence, complexity and uncertainty have .rendered inadequate the purely rational model of a job as a compendium of tasks, and have broadened the meaning ofworkplace effectiveness [2]. Exclusive preoccupation with the task domain may no longer serve the best interests of organizations wishing to achieve sustainability and competitiveness [3]. Research on work performance and performance appraisal suggests that while continuous improvement oftask-related competencies remains important, the value ofemployees to an organization is not based solely on task performance [4]. For example, rather than passively accepting sub optimal organizational routines as' givens', employees may thus actively reconstruct and enhance them through interaction with members of their role set.