Define citizenship behavior and discuss its categories and subcategories. give examples.

Prosocial behaviors

3Prosocial behavior refers to an employee’s helpful behavior toward other individuals or the organization. This behavior is beneficial for the people to whom it is directed (individuals or the organization). In general, a prosocial behavior in the workplace can be described as any act aimed at improving the situation of the person to whom the help is directed (Bierhoff, 2002). Prosocial behaviors at work can be considered a key element of organizational effectiveness in the sense that they lead to improvement in the work environment through a series of acts performed by employees. These acts have been designated by several terms in the literature: organizational citizenship behavior (Organ, 1988), extra-role behavior (Van Dyne & LePine, 1998), contextual performance, and mobilization. Organizational citizenship behavior was originally defined as any intentional and discretionary behavior performed by an employee that is not recognized or compensated, but which nevertheless improves the functioning of an organization (Organ, 1988; Schnake, 1991). Initially, organizational citizenship behavior was perceived as a voluntary, extra-role act that serves to help other members of the organization accomplish their work, while at the same time demonstrating support toward one’s organization (Smith, Organ, & Near, 1983). Examples of such efforts include cooperation with peers, performing extra role tasks, punctuality, helping one’s coworkers, using one’s time at work effectively, sharing ideas, or representing one’s organization positively. Seen as such, this type of behavior has been studied by measuring two of its components, i.e., altruism and general compliance (Organ & Ryan, 1995). Altruism refers to helping behaviors intentionally directed toward a specific person. Compliance refers to a manifestation of social awareness in regard to organizational values and procedures. Organ (1988) later expanded this definition by specifying that even if organizational citizenship behaviors are not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, they contribute to the overall effectiveness of the organization’s operations. Accordingly, the author proposed a taxonomy which remains the most widely used. The taxonomy covers the following five characteristic facets of organizational citizenship behavior. Altruism refers to a deliberate behavior aimed at helping another person in one’s workplace. Conscientiousness refers to a set of behaviors complying with those established by the organization (for example, getting to work on time). Sportsmanship is adopting a positive attitude, e.g., being sportsmanlike would mean not complaining about trivial things. Next is courtesy, which translates into asking other people’s opinions before taking action. It would also involve being vigilant in anticipating potential difficulties likely to cause problems in coworkers’ jobs (Paillé & Pohl, 2008). Finally, civic virtue would mean concerning oneself with issues that are important to the organization, i.e., getting involved in organizational matters.

4The concept of organizational citizenship has generated an abundant literature. In the past twenty years, numerous types of citizenship have been identified (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, D, 2000), inspired by the pioneering work by Organ (1988). More than thirty different types of citizenship have been distinguished, then grouped into seven categories.

5Although the origin of the organizational citizenship concept goes back to Bateman and Organ (1983), numerous researchers have worked more on the relationships between this concept and other variables than on the concept itself (Podsakoff et al., 2000). The concept rests on the idea that satisfaction at work gives rise to the desire to help one’s coworkers and predisposes one to cooperate in order to maintain workplace processes. Podsakoff and MacKenzie (1994) showed that OCB are close to managers’ evaluations of employee performance and attribution of rewards. According to the theory of social exchange, OCB constitute beneficial acts that employees provide to an organization in exchange for advantages they receive from the organization. Bishop, Scott and Burroughs (2000, in Paillé, 2009, p.?191) showed that commitment to the organization and to the work team positively and simultaneously influences organization-oriented citizenship.

6Organizational citizenship behaviors cover a large whole of behaviors, ranging from mutual assistance among coworkers to spreading a good image of the organization. All of the studies show that organizational citizenship behavior is a multidimensional construct. However, there is no consensus in the literature on the exact number of dimensions involved. More recently, Paillé (2009) proposed to retain three main types of citizenship: mutual help, team spirit, and civic-mindedness. OCB are comparable to a form of organizational spontaneity in which they are also defined as discretionary behaviors contributing to the improvement of organizational operations. Some researchers have proposed to classify organizational citizenship behaviors into two different categories: affiliative versus challenging (Van Dyne, Cummings, & Parks, 1995). Affiliative citizenship behaviors are actions seeking to maintain the status quo by promoting and supporting existing relationships at work, including providing help to coworkers, being courteous to others, and taking the initiative during overtime work (Van Dyne et al., 1995). Challenging citizenship behaviors, on the other hand, are actions aimed at modifying the status quo by casting doubt on existing relational processes (Van Dyne et al., 1995). These behaviors include voice problems (Van Dyne & LePine, 1998), and taking charge of implementing constructive changes in work methods. The studies show that these two categories of organizational citizenship behavior contribute to effective results for organizations (Van Dyne & LePine, 1998; Podsakoff et al., 2000). Accordingly, “behaviors not explicitly required, such as organizational citizenship behaviors, contribute to the proper functioning of the organization” (Paillé, 2008, p. 33). They are important “because they shape the organizational, social and psychological context” (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993, p.?71). In general, organizational citizenship behavior, associated with its related concepts, rests on Organ’s definition (1988, p.?4): “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”. Organizational citizenship behavior is defined as individual behavior of a discretionary type, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, that contributes to the proper functioning of the organization. According to Smith, Organ, and Near (1983), OCB have two dimensions: (1) extra-role, which pertains to altruism and describes person-oriented behavior, and (2) intra-role, which emphasizes the importance of professional conscientiousness (organization-oriented). In 1994, Organ grouped these organizational citizenship behaviors into five major categories: altruism, conscientiousness, team spirit, civic-mindedness, and courtesy. Organizational citizenship behaviors include an entire set of behaviors, from mutual help among employees to spreading a good image of the company among coworkers.

7All these studies show that organizational citizenship behavior is a multidimensional construct. In the context of our study, we will need to distinguish OCB that directly benefit the organization from those directed mainly toward individuals, which therefore benefit the organization only indirectly.

8Two approaches have been proposed, each with its own categorization of organizational citizenship behaviors. One approach establishes a typology based on groups of behaviors such as tolerance, conscientiousness, civic virtue, altruism and courtesy (Organ, 1988; Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman, & Fetter, 1990). The second approach divides organizational citizenship behaviors into two main categories, depending on whether they are centered on individuals (OCB-I) or the organization (OCB-O; McNeely & Meglino, 1994; Williams & Anderson, 1991). A new conceptualization of prosocial organizational behavior was proposed by Desrumaux (2007, p. 109). In this approach, two main categories of behavior can be distinguished. The first is pro-organizational behaviors, or “all voluntary behavior that helps preserve organizational standards and serves to maintain the well-being of the members of the organization.” Three types of pro-organizational behaviors are defined. Prosocial property behaviors involve such things as an employee making individual possessions available to serve the organization, as for example the act of donating equipment to the company. Prosocial political behaviors are rooted in an acceptance of company rules and procedures (for example, working during breaks). Prosocial production behaviors are those aimed at increasing the quantity or improving the quality of work (overinvesting in one’s job; employees showing such strongly committed behavior might, for example, take their work home or even devote their weekend to finishing a current project).

9The second type is pro-individual behaviors, which are “positive behaviors directed toward individuals, and which are voluntary behaviors executed freely by an individual in such a way as to increase the well-being, feeling of autonomy, recognition, and self-esteem of people, for the purpose of preserving or developing the quality of life among people at work” (Desrumaux, 2007). Pro-individual behaviors can be divided into three subcategories: autonomy, mobilization, and dynamism. Autonomy within a company is described as an employee’s ability to determine rules of action with which he/she will comply, and to set up specific activity modes inside his/her sphere of action, without having someone else (here, the organization) imposing standards (Chatzis, Mounier, Veltz, & Zarifian, 1999, p.?29). Autonomy pertains to a type of responsibility with respect to oneself when accomplishing a task, a form of independence. Prosocial actions that are freely accomplished, and that express a person’s well-internalized values, allow that person to feel that his/her need for autonomy has been satisfied. The concept of autonomy has to do with taking initiatives, margin to maneuver, and the potential to be entrepreneurial. This is a sought-after quality in work teams since it leads to willing accomplishment of actions and the outward expression of well-internalized values, which also provide opportunities to satisfy one’s needs. Mobilization, according to the definition proposed by Tremblay and Wils (2005) corresponds to a critical mass of employees who accomplish actions (which may or may not be part of their employment contract and may or may not be remunerated), and which benefit the well-being of others and their company and contribute to the accomplishment of a collective endeavor. Mobilization behaviors include providing assistance to others, coordination with others, organizational loyalty, dedication to one’s job, and development of competency and performance. According to Tremblay and Simard’s (2005) model of human-resource mobilization, healthy exchanges between employers and employees lead to employee mobilization behaviors, the source of their performance and hence organizational performance. Dynamism is an ability to commit to one’s job. Dynamism assumes a sense of purpose, values, and priorities. An employee is said to be dynamic when each act performed in the context of his/her job is in pursuit of a goal or a value recognized by the organization.

10Next, help and support behaviors involve assisting one’s coworkers, or being an altruist. They represent a person’s willingness to help members of his/her organization when they encounter difficulties in their job tasks. Help refers to various types of assistance that is geared to the nature of the problem identified. Helping behavior manifests itself in several ways. The types most studied are altruism, conciliation, and courtesy. Support can be perceived in terms of activities (comforting a coworker, lending money, giving information, or sharing tasks), in terms of relationships (having contact with other members of the organization — people on whom one can rely in case of difficulty), or in terms of the individual, while taking into consideration the degree of satisfaction with the help received. In defining supportive behavior, Barrera (1986) spoke of social support as being a set of actions or behaviors that effectively provide help to someone. Support behaviors consist of listening, affectivity, lending money. Flynn (2005) considers that individuals are able to help their coworkers because they identify with the whole organization. As a result, they have exchange-oriented relationships with all members of the organization, because they identify personally with a specific member and maintain a one-on-one relationship with this person. Finally, under the third category of pro-individual behaviors, we have valuing, gratification, and encouragement behaviors. This category pertains to “behaviors performed by employees for the purpose of encouraging other people’s work, as well as respecting it and giving it value. These behaviors are accompanied by gestures of recognition, compliments, words of congratulation for a job well done, etc.” (Desrumaux, 2007, p. 14). This recent conceptualization, more complete than previous ones, includes some of the dimensions of organizational citizenship behavior defined by Organ (1988) and Van Dyne et al. (1995). For example, the pro-political dimension of prosocial behavior is equivalent to the dimension “loyalty toward the organization” within the OCB category, which clearly shows the overlapping of these concepts in the literature.

Individual and organizational variables involved in explaining prosocial behaviors

11In the literature, prosocial behaviors that can be observed in individuals on the job are determined by organizational variables (justice and commitment) and individual variables (personality, satisfaction, affect). Several studies have attempted to explain the potential links between organizational justice and behaviors at work. It seems that employees’ feelings of justice or injustice regarding the organization have an impact on reactions within the company.

12All organizations are founded on the basis of distributions (salaries, bonuses, decisions, rules), procedures regarding these distributions, and interpersonal relations. Studies by Greenberg and Colquitt on organizational justice (2005) distinguished several types of injustice feelings: distributive, relating to unjust allocation of rewards; procedural, where for example an employee does not have the right to express himself/herself; and interpersonal, where interactions are judged to be unfair. According to these authors, the feeling of informational injustice refers to the actual content of interactions; in other words, it concerns information on procedures used to make decisions (Colquitt, 2001; Greenberg, 2006). Perceptions of justice are very important to employees’ involvement and satisfaction, as well as to their relationships with the company hierarchy. This adds up to four types of justice being studied (Colquitt, 2001). Distributive justice was defined by Melkonian, Monin, Noordelhaven, Rouzies, & Timmers, (2006, p.?232) as “the degree to which decisions are perceived as just by employees”. The notion of distributive justice comes from studies on Adams’ equity theory (1965) whereby individuals assess fairness by calculating the ratio between their contributions (what they bring to the company) and their rewards (what they receive, which includes salaries and bonuses, among other things), while comparing their situation to that of others working under the same conditions. The next type of justice, procedural, concerns decision-making procedures. Defined as the fairness of procedures and methods used to make decisions at work, procedural justice pertains to the formal characteristics of a system. The third type, interpersonal justice, is based on the quality of interpersonal treatment that individuals receive from others (sincerity, respect, politeness, etc.). The general idea underlying this notion is that people look at how well they are treated by decision-makers (Bies & Moag, 1986). Informational justice concerns the perceived fairness of explanations and information received during interpersonal exchanges (Colquitt, 2001). This information must be given on a regular basis, and should be clear and reciprocal as well. Reciprocity in this case means that the person providing the information asks for the employee’s opinion. Cohen-Charash and Spector (2001) pointed out correlations between procedural and distributive justice, and organizational citizenship behaviors. Similarly, a study by Desrumaux, Léoni, Bernaud and Defrancq (2012) showed that prosocial behaviors are linked to different types of commitment and procedural justice.

13In light of the literature, we hypothesized that there is a link between organizational and individual variables and the manifestation of prosocial behaviors. To verify this hypothesis, we had to test several sub-hypotheses. Based on the various links identified between organizational justice and prosocial behaviors, we expected, for most of the subdimensions, that (indirect) perception of justice and prosociality would be positively associated (Hypothesis 1).

14The concept of commitment has been the focus of a large body of research. In regards to organizational attachment, Porter, Steers, Mowday, and Boulian (1974, p. 603) defined commitment as “the intensity of an individual’s attachment, and identification with his organization”. In this sense, commitment can be seen as a measure of how strongly one personally identifies with a given organization (Mowday, Steers, & Porter 1979, p.?226). In a recent study, it was demonstrated that a boss’s behavior had an indirect effect on organizational citizenship behavior by impacting the commitment of employees (Meierhans, Rietmann, & Klaus, 2008, p.?132). On their side, Meyer and Allen (1991, p.?67) defined commitment as “a psychological state that (a) characterizes the relationship of the employee to his/her organization and (b) affects the decision as to whether or not to stay with the company”. They proposed a three-component model of commitment to the organization. In addition, it has been shown that affective organizational commitment (AOC) and normative organizational commitment (NOC) are good predictors of organizational citizenship behaviors (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002; Organ & Ryan, 1995; Podsakoff et al., 2000). In this context, it is important to determine which dimensions of commitment are most likely to produce prosocial behaviors. A study by Paillé (2009) on the link between commitment and citizenship made a substantial contribution. He referred to the work on normative commitment and citizenship by Stinglhamber, Bentein, and Vandenberghe (2002) and Vandenberghe, Stinglhamber, Bentein and Delhaise (2001) to study these two concepts in terms of three targets: the supervisor, the work group, and the organization. His study, which measured four forms of affective commitment, provided evidence that commitment to the organization is a stronger predictor for OCB than for ICB (individual citizenship behaviors), commitment to the work team is a better predictor for ICB than for OCB, commitment to coworkers promotes ICB, and commitment to one’s boss promotes OCB. Exploring the relationships between various forms of prosociality and various levels of commitment, we hypothesized that affective commitment and normative commitment would be correlated with prosocial behaviors (Hypothesis?2).

15Personality is a concept that must be addressed in order to understand the attitudes and behaviors of individuals in the workplace. In this respect, as Goldberg (1990) asserted, understanding personality will help managers make use of individual differences at work for the purpose of facilitating teamwork, promoting skill development, and improving job performance. Personality would thus seem to be one of the basic factors affecting the manifestation of prosocial behaviors at work. In 1991, Barrick and Mount published a meta-analysis on the subject and noted that the traits of conscientiousness and emotional stability were good predictors of performance at work. The relationship between personality traits and job performance is based on scientific studies demonstrating the importance of this factor in the working world. Certain dimensions of personality would seem to be more positively associated with prosocial behaviors than others. Desrumaux et al., (2012), for example, provided evidence that agreeability contributed significantly to explaining prosocial behaviors. Ménard et al. (2007), who studied the links between personality and the emission of antisocial behaviors at work, observed a negative correlation between agreeability and anti-property behavior. We can therefore assume that agreeability is positively linked to pro-property behaviors. Agreeability would be able to significantly predict pro-property behavior. Agreeability should explain some prosocial behaviors such as those involving property and production (Hypothesis 3).

16Affect is a generic term representing various emotions felt during individual experiences. Positive affect (PA), associated with positive emotions such as happiness or excitement, can be distinguished from negative affect (NA) associated with negative emotions such as fear (Russell & Barrett, 1999). These two dimensions are not at opposite ends of a continuum, but constitute independent dimensions (Weiss, 2002). With support from the work by Brief and Weis (2002), who demonstrated a link between positive affect and certain prosocial behaviors, and between negative affect and certain antisocial behaviors, we hypothesized that positive affectivity would explain pro-organizational behaviors (Hypothesis 4.1) and pro-individual behaviors (Hypothesis 4.2).

Context and sample

17This study was conducted with a sample of 148 workers, of which 54 were men (27.40%) and 94 women (72.60%) selected from 67 different French companies, agencies and other organizations located in the Northern France (the second most urbanized region in France after the Parisian region). All sectors of activity were represented (private sector, government, institutions). The sample was mainly made up of individuals from hospitals in mid-level healthcare occupations, more than 60 %, to which we added 6 % from mid-level administrative occupations, which increased the proportion of mid-level occupations to 66 % of our population. An added sampling of managers and other professionals represented 15 %. The mean age was 30.74 years (SD?=?16.20). The questionnaires were filled out on a voluntary basis and, all participants were mainly recruited directly at their workplace and with the agreement of the supervisors. A general purpose of the study (e.g., investigating behaviors and attitudes at work), as well as the time required to complete the questionnaire (e.g., 40 minutes), were presented to individuals solicited in order to obtain their informed consent to participate. Participants were instructed to complete the questionnaires on their personal time within two weeks before returning them to the research assistants. Participants were also reassured that all their responses would be kept confidential and anonymous.

Measurements

18The prosocial behaviors were the dependent variables (DV or criteria) and were measured via a questionnaire validated by Desrumaux et al. (2012). Initially, the questionnaire consisted of 126 questions divided into 12 categories of behavior. Following a factor analysis, this number was reduced. The prosocial scales (? = .75) for this study included 6 categories of behaviors with a total of 29 items. The subjects responded on scales ranging from 1 (never) to 6 (very often). These ratings were used to calculate the frequencies at which the behaviors were reported. It is important to note that with the above measurement, the response scale did not specify the exact frequency: for some participants, “rarely” could correspond to once a month whereas for others, this could refer to less than once every six months. To avoid this problem, similarly to Rioux, Savoie and Brunet (2003), we proposed the following frequency scale: never, every 6 months, every 3 months, every month, every week, every day.

19The first independent variable (IV), dealing with organizational justice (? = .75), was measured using Colquitt’s (2001) scale pertaining to various types of justice: distributive, procedural, interactional, and informational. This scale consisted of 20 statements. The subjects were asked to indicate to what degree these measures had been applied in the context of their job. They responded on a 5-point Likert-type scale with choices ranging from 1 (to a minimal degree) to 5 (to a high degree).

20The second IV, commitment (? = .76), was measured by the Nyock’s scale (2007, p.?243): 18 questions falling on three dimensions (6 for normative commitment, 6 for instrumental commitment, and 6 for affective commitment). For normative commitment, Nyock utilized Paillé’s 6-item scale (2004) composed of items taken from the scale validated by Vandenberghe et al. (2001). The subjects responded on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from “completely disagree” to “completely agree”.

21Personality (? = .77), was evaluated using a test based on the Big Five Theory, namely the Alter-Ego test, which consists of five personality dimensions (Bernaud & Debaisieux, 1997). For theoretical reasons and to keep the questionnaire from getting too long, only three of the five dimensions were measured: agreeableness, neuroticism, and extraversion. For each of the three dimensions, there were 24 questions, making a total of 72 statements rated on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (totally true) to 5 (totally false).

22Affect was studied using the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS, from Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988; ? = .77). This is a Likert-type scale on which the answer choices range from 1 (very little or not at all) to 5 (very often or completely). The scale consists of 20 items. Participants noted the frequency with which they experienced each one of the states.

Limitations and directions for future research

30Several methodological limitations should be mentioned. First, the content of some of our behaviors was subject to the social desirability bias, which was in effect here for the prosociality items, even though anonymity was guaranteed. An important limitation is that diary data are correlational in nature and prosocial behaviors were self-reported. Therefore, it is possible that this method has introduced biases. In future common method needs to be controlled for to exclude potential rival explanations for observed pattern of correlations (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003). While the partial correlation procedure accounts for common method variance in the assessed relationships, this methodology could not control for all possible sources of common method biases. In our results (Table 1), some correlations are high. Multicolinearity could be suspected reflecting another limitation.

31Next, it should be noted that the population, although taken mostly from the hospital setting, was not really homogeneous. This limits the scope and external validity of our study. Despite the merits of having demonstrated the impact of organizational justice and affectivity, a large part of the variance was still not explained, and the predictive value of certain variables (i.e., the Big Five variables) remains limited. Clearly, predicting behaviors is still a challenging area of research (Ajzen, 2002; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Other links between prosocial behaviors and different explanatory variables thus remain to be explored.

32In the future, in an attempt to more accurately measure certain prosocial behaviors (political, help), we plan to take into account certain dimensions of Paillé’s scale (2007) such as civic virtue and team spirit.

33In order to optimize the prediction of prosociality in the workplace, we know that a very effective indicator is behavioral intention (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). In the future — and in light of studies demonstrating links between behavior and satisfaction of needs (Chatzisarantis & Biddle, 1998) — it would also be worthwhile to explore the effects of self-efficacy and locus of control, and particularly the impact of satisfaction of fundamental needs such as competency, autonomy, and affiliation (Decy & Ryan, 1985, 2000).

Practical implications

34On a practical level, processes and actions aimed at enhancing justice and promoting commitment would tend to favor the emergence of various types of prosociality in the workplace. We also know that prosocial behaviors are critical in preventing deterioration of the work environment. Prosociality of employees has been shown to a genuine protective factor against harassment at work (Desrumaux, 2011; Desrumaux & De Chacus, 2007). Creating a favorable climate, modifying policies overly focused on profits and performance, and managing companies more equitably, would surely lead to an increase in feelings of justice, positive affectivity on the job, and commitment. In particular, improving organizational justice would help reduce aggression and would not only favor the emergence of organizational prosocialities such as pro-property behavior, but would also have a positive impact on employee health.