Peer-Rated Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Abstract

Abstract. Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) is valuable to organizations and has become an important focus of employee performance evaluation. Employees’ peers may be particularly well-situated to rate their OCB. We investigated the proportion of variance in peer-rated OCB attributable to the ratee (true score) versus the rater (rater bias). Furthermore, we investigated whether these proportions were affected by the familiarity of the peer with the ratee. We found that high familiarity was associated with a greater proportion of ratee variance (.43 vs. .18), and a lower proportion of rater bias (.30 vs. .51), than was the case with low-to-moderate familiarity. Thus, when choosing peers as raters of OCB, there may be value in carefully considering the peers’ familiarity with the ratees.