Organizational Citizenship Behavior & Employee Well-Being

This work tests the relationship between dimensions of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) and measures of well-being. The study hypothesizes that OCB will be related positively with psychological health and negatively with burnout. OCB targeted at other individuals (OCBI) will positively relate with relatedness need satisfaction. It further hypothesizes negative relationship of relatedness need satisfaction with burnout and burnout with psychological health. Web-based survey was used for data collection for the study. OCBI was found positively related with relatedness need satisfaction and OCB-Organization was positively related with psychological health. Further, relatedness need satisfaction was negatively associated with burnout and burnout was negatively associated with psychological health. Introduction Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) was initially defined by Organ (1988: 4) as "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". Later, Organ (1997:91) redefined OCB as behavior that "contributes to the maintenance and enhancement of the social and psychological context that supports task performance". Since then, there has been rapid growth in research on the nature, antecedents, and consequences of OCB (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine & Bachrach, 2000; Podsakoff, Whiting, Podsakoff & Blunie, 2009). However, the growth in research is uneven, as the consequences of OCB have not been studied as extensively as its antecedents (Spitzmuller, Van Dyne & Hies, 2008). In the past research, consequences of OCB have been studied at organizational, group, and individual levels. Studies focusing on the organizational level outcomes of OCB (e.g., Dunlop & Lee, 2004; Podsakoff et al., 2009) have shown that OCB is positively related to a variety of organizational effectiveness measures (including production quantity, efficiency, profitability, and reduction of costs). At unit/group level, OCB is negatively related to unit-level turnover (e.g., Sun, Aryee & Law, 2007; Podsakoff et al., 2009), and positively related to unit sales (e.g., Podsakoff et al., 2009) and customer satisfaction (e.g., Yen & Niehoff, 2004; Podsakoff et al., 2009). At the individual level of analysis, OCB-like behaviors are positively related to performance evaluations (e.g., Allen & Rush, 1998; Podsakoff et al., 2009) and reward recommendation decisions (e.g., Allen & Rush, 1998; Johnson, Erez, Kiker, M and negatively related to turnover intentions (e.g., Chen, Hui & Sego, 1998;Coyne & Ong, 2007). It is evident from the past research that scholars have mostly focused on the outcomes of managerial interest. Possibly, the only individual-level outcome that takes the actor's perspective is turnover intentions. Otherwise, the outcomes of OCB for the doer/actor have been ignored. In recent times, an increasing body of research on pro-social behaviors has taken a social and personality psychology perspective for exploring its consequences for the doer/actor (e.g., Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin & Schroeder, 2005; Thoits & Hewitt, 2001). However, no such attention has been paid in the OCB research despite the fact that OCBs are a specific form of pro-social behaviors (Spitzmuller et al., 2008). We believe that the focus on individual-level consequences of OCB from the social and personality psychology front offers a promising research avenue. From the research on pro-social behaviors, it is evident that people who indulge in pro-social behaviors experience positive affect (Penner et al., 2005), less burnout (Grant & Campbell, 2007), good psychological health (Penner et al., 2005), and relatedness need satisfaction (Weinstein & Ryan, 2010). As OCB is a specific form of pro-social behavior, we expect similar relationships between OCB and aforesaid individual-level outcomes. …