Where does organizational citizenship behavior collide?

Dennis Organ's 1988 book Organizational citizenship behavior: The good soldier syndrome defined the construct as discretionary individual behaviour, not directly recognized by the formal reward system, that in aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization. The picture is of the good soldier who helps colleagues, cooperates, tolerates minor inconveniences, and speaks up for the organization without being told to. Podsakoff and colleagues reviewed the literature in 2000 and organized it around dimensions such as helping, sportsmanship, and civic virtue, which became the standard way to measure it. Organ himself reopened the definition in 1997, dropping the two original qualifiers because they did not hold up, and moving the meaning toward what other authors already called contextual performance. This is the referent name on the map, but it was neither the first label for these acts nor the last.[1][2][3]

Unit

An employee's discretionary, cooperative workplace behaviour

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Supervisor or self ratings on OCB scales, often the altruism, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, courtesy, and civic-virtue dimensions

Borman and Motowidlo split job performance into two parts: task performance, which supports the technical core, and contextual performance, which supports the organizational, social, and psychological environment in which the technical work happens. Contextual performance covers volunteering for extra work, helping and cooperating with others, persisting with enthusiasm, following rules, and endorsing organizational goals. Motowidlo and Van Scotter showed in 1994 that this non-task component predicts a supervisor's overall performance rating over and above task performance, which is why the split was worth making. The behaviours listed are, almost item for item, the ones Organ called citizenship. What changes is the frame: here they are a rated dimension of job performance rather than voluntary acts sitting outside the appraisal.[4][5]

Unit

The non-task, supportive component of job performance

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Supervisor ratings of contextual, non-task performance dimensions

Brief and Motowidlo defined prosocial organizational behaviour in 1986 as behaviour directed toward an individual, group, or organization with the intention of promoting their welfare, carried out while a person acts in an organizational role. This is the earliest of the four labels, two years ahead of Organ's book, and it is drawn from the prosocial-behaviour tradition in social psychology rather than from performance appraisal. It is deliberately broad: it includes both functionally helpful acts and dysfunctional ones, such as helping a colleague in a way that harms the organization, and it spans both in-role and extra-role behaviour. Strip away the welfare-motive framing and the functional core is the same helping and cooperation the other three names describe. The distinctive claim is about intention, not about which acts count.[6]

Unit

Behaviour intended to benefit a person, group, or the organization

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Typologies and rating measures of helping and prosocial acts

Van Dyne, Cummings, and Parks proposed extra-role behaviour in 1995 as an umbrella term for behaviour that benefits the organization, is discretionary, and goes beyond existing role expectations. Their subtitle, in pursuit of construct and definitional clarity, is a direct response to the jangle: by the mid-1990s citizenship, prosocial organizational behaviour, whistle-blowing, and principled dissent had accumulated as overlapping and inconsistently defined labels. They tried to organize the mess with two dimensions, affiliative versus challenging and promotive versus prohibitive, so that helping and voice sit in different cells rather than under one vague heading. The attempt is telling: a fourth name introduced mainly to tidy the first three. The shared core is still discretionary behaviour beyond the assigned role.[7]

Unit

Discretionary behaviour beyond formal role requirements

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Extra-role behaviour typologies; helping and voice scales