Citizenship pressure and job performance: roles of citizenship fatigue and continuance commitment

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between employees' experience of citizenship pressure and job performance, as well as the mediating role of citizenship fatigue and moderating role of continuance commitment. Multisource, time-lagged data from employees and their supervisors in Pakistan reveal that employees' beliefs that they have no other choice than to take on allegedly voluntary activities undermine their job performance, due to energy depletion evoked as citizenship fatigue. Their continuance commitment buffers this process; the indirect relationship between citizenship pressure and job performance, through citizenship fatigue, is weaker when employees believe they have limited employment alternatives, because they may perceive expectations of their citizenship as opportunities instead of threats in this case. Human resource managers thus should recognize that excessive organizational pressures for citizenship behaviors can undermine job performance, but less so among employees for whom leaving the organization appears costly.

Compulsory Citizenship Behavior and Employee Creativity: Creative Self-Efficacy as a Mediator and Negative Affect as a Moderator

“…Citizenship behaviors are not explicitly recognized by an organization's formal reward system (Organ, 1988). Consequently, excessive organizational pressures for citizenship behaviors can lead to citizenship fatigue-a state in which employees feel worn out, tired, or on edge attributed to engaging in OCBs (Bolino et al, 2015;De Clercq et al, 2019). As for CCB, it stands as a salient social pressure in the organization (Vigoda-Gadot, 2007) that threatens and depletes employees' desirable resources.…”

“…Prior research on OCB—“individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization” ( Organ, 1988 , p. 4)—has advocated its positive influences on employees and organizations. However, in recent years, there is an emerging stream of research starts to question the exclusive discretionary nature of OCB ( Youn et al, 2017 ; Germeys et al, 2019 ) and examine the potential negative consequences of OCB ( Deery et al, 2017 ; De Clercq et al, 2019 ; He et al, 2019a ). In particular, the destructive effects of the enforced/non-voluntary version of citizenship behavior, which was described by Vigoda-Gadot (2006) as CCB, have attracted considerable attention from OB and human resource management (HRM) scholars (e.g., Zhao et al, 2014 ; He et al, 2018 , 2019a ).…”

Crafting Jobs for Sustaining Careers during China’s Manufacturing Digitalization

“…Control Variables: Referring to prior studies [8,10,13] (e.g., Meyer et al, 2010 [8]; De Clercq et al, 2019 [10]; Han et al, 2019 [13]), gender (0 = female; 1 = male), job position (0 = non-manager; 1 = manager), age, and organizational tenure were controlled for in this current paper.…”

“…Individuals who feel high CC to their employer may tend to have low motivation, because staying in an organization may not be what they want but what they need. As mentioned above, employees' CC can be viewed as a prominent manifestation of their perception of job insecurity-related stress, as it embodies the calculative, opportunistic aspect of commitment [10,12,13]. Employees who feel resentful and hopeless about their career future in their organizations may still choose to stay with the organizations because leaving would be very costly when taking into account the significant organization-specific investments they have made, the limited career alternatives outside the organizations, or both [14].…”

“…It should be noted that the concept of continuance commitment (CC), which characterizes employees' perceived cost of leaving an organization (i.e., high-sacrifice component) and their perceived lack of job alternatives (i.e., low alternative component) [8,9], can address the calculative aspect of commitment, as employees may, regardless of their emotional detachment, still stay with an organization due to necessity rather than choice. Given that scholars have claimed that CC particularly reflects employees' job insecurity-related stress [10], we thus use this variable as a manifestation of employees' perception of work strains and job insecurity here.…”