Collective Dynamics of Citizenship Behaviour: What Group Characteristics Promote Group‐Level Helping?

Abstract

A basic tenet of research on organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is that OCB aggregated across individuals improves organizational performance. Departing from the typical focus on individual-level OCB, the construct of group-level OCB (GOCB) recently emerged as a critical group function that affects various group effectiveness measures. Despite the clear link between GOCB and team performance, the existing literature provides a limited understanding with regard to the antecedents of GOCB, mostly focusing on leadership variables. Establishing helping behaviour (a core dimension of OCB) as a collective construct, this study substantially expands the antecedents of group-level helping, and empirically tests their effects using three different operationalizations of group-level helping. The results, based on a sample of 96 work units, show that membership diversity in gender and education decreased group-level helping, whereas diversity in tenure increased it. Group-level helping was also positively related to leadership characteristics (supportive unit manager, transformational top management) and perceived competence of unit members. In addition, the analysis further indicated that perceived competence is a positive predictor of group-level helping only when the unit members also believe that others are trustworthy in terms of integrity and benevolent motivation. From a methodological standpoint, the study provides important insights by comparing different ways of operationalizing collective constructs. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2009.

The Consequences of Workplace Bullying Toward Employee Organizational Citizenship Behavior

“…Ehigie and Otukoya (2005) examined how perceived organizational support and perceived fair interpersonal treatment relates to organizational citizenship behavior by controlling the effect tenure and found that tenure contributed significantly to the variance of organizational citizenship behavior. When examining grouplevel organizational citizenship behavior, Choi (2009) found that diversity in tenure increases the degree of group-level organizational citizenship behavior.…”

Team OCB, leader charisma, and organizational change: A multilevel study

“…Although OCBs are exhibited at the individual level, Organ's (1988, p. 4) original definition already suggested that their importance lies mainly in the aggregate across individuals as a higher-level phenomenon: OCB is "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" (emphasis added). The construct that captures the aggregate of OCB is called team (or unit, group, and collective) OCB (Bommer, Dierdorff, & Rubin, 2007;Choi, 2009;Ehrhart, 2004;Ehrhart, Bliese, & Thomas, 2006;Ehrhart & Naumann, 2004;Liu, Gong, & Liu, 2014). Team OCB does not focus on the individual team member, rather it focuses on the team as a whole.…”

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Multi-level Longitudinal Dynamics Between Procedural Justice and Interpersonal Helping in Organizational Teams

“…Based on previous studies on interpersonal trust (Choi 2009;Mayer and Davis 1999), a four-item scale (a = .80) was constructed to assess coworker trust climate. This scale includes the following items: (a) ''In performing tasks, team members adhere to the basic principles of integrity'', …”