Role of Perceived Organizational Support in the Relationship between Role Overload and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Organizations cannot survive or prosper without their members behaving as good citizens by engaging themselves in all sorts of positive behaviors. The importance of good citizenship for organizations, understanding the nature and sources of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has long been a high priority for organizational scholars (Organ, 1988). Every organization depends on countless acts of cooperation, helpfulness, suggestions, gestures of goodwill, altruism and other instances of what we might call citizenship behavior. In recent times, huge amount of studies have examined organizational citizenship behavior and emphasized its importance on organizational outcomes. Several factors such as job satisfaction, justice, and support or trust from the organization and leaders were suggested by many researchers for increasing employees' OCB (Foote & Tang, 2008; Ackfeldt & Coote, 2000; Organ & Lingl, 1995; Williams & Anderson, 1991). There has been considerable interest recently in the relationship between, perceived organizational support, role overload, and the OCB. This interest is driven by the growing recognition that perceived organizational support and role overload are highly prevalent in the workplace and have an enormous impact on performance, productivity, absenteeism, and disability costs.Organ (1988) defined OCB as "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. By discretionary, we mean that the behavior is not an enforceable requirement of the role or the job description, that is, it is clearly a specifiable term of the person's employment contract with the organization; the behavior is rather a matter of personal choice, such that its omission is not generally understood as punishable". Organ (1988) has said on the basis of his comprehensive literature review and empirical studies that OCB included five dimensions namely Altruism, Conscientiousness, Sportsmanship, Courtesy and Civic virtue.Role overload occurs when work-role require more time and effort than an individual has for them so that the roles cannot be performed adequately and comfortably (Markham & Bonjean, 1996). French and Caplan (1973) have differentiated role overload in quantitative and qualitative overload. Quantitative overload occurs when there is too much to do in too limited period of time and qualitative overload refers to a state of being in which work demands exceed capability. The absolute level of work needed to be done (objective overload) is mediated by characteristics of the individual to determine subjective or perceived overload. What is too much for one person may be perceived reasonable by another (Matteson & Ivancevich, 1987). It has long been clear that both work overload and work under load can be problematic (Frankenhauser, 1975; Frankenhauser & Gardell, 1975; Lundberg & Forsman, 1979). Some psychologists suggest a linear positive relationship between stress and performance. Meglino (1977) argues that at low levels of stress, challenge is absent and performance is poor. Optimal performance in his model comes at the highest level of stress. Driskell and Salas (1996) suggest that work-related stress increases motivation and performance. Riley and Zaccaro (1987) said that the impact of stress on performance depends on the nature, intensity, duration, and resource available to the employee to respond adaptively.Perceived organizational support (POS) refers to the extent to which the organization values employees' contributions and cares about their well-being (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986). The premise of social exchange theory suggests that resources are more valued when discretionary choice has guided the action, rather than external factors. Therefore, organizational systems such as pay, promotions, and job enrichment are more highly valued when employees sense that the organization has selected the programs out of genuine concern for the recipient (Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002). …