The Characteristics Of Organizational Citizenship Behavior

1. Organizational Behavior (OB)

Organizational behavior (OB) is the actions of people behavior at work (Robbins, Stephen P., 2012) and how their actions affect the organization’s performance (Robbins, Stephen P., 2013). And it is “a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness” (Robbins, Stephen P. 2013, p. 10). In the late 1700s, Robert Owen (1889) was first concerned about miserable working conditions. He proposed the ideal working environment and stated that spending on employees’ training was a wise investment. Chester Barnard (1938) thought that, as social systems, organizations

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB)

The organizational citizenship behavior was first formalized by Bateman and Organ, and was defined 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. (D. W. Organ, 1988, p.4)” Later, Organ (1997) further developed the OCB as the indirect contribution to the organization through maintaining the social system of the organization.

OCBs can take numerous structures, however, the most commonly defined features could be outlined as altruism, conscientiousness, civic virtue, sportsmanship, and

Bret Becton & Hubert S. Field, 2009). Other than being additional part or going past “the call of duty”, other real measurements are that “OCBs are discretionary or voluntary in nature and that they are not necessarily recognized by the formal reward system of the organization.” (D. W. Organ, 1997, p.85-98) There were some makeup features of OCB provided by different scientists, such as Graham (1991) and Van Dyne et al. (1994). Besides the classic five dimensions of OCB, functional participation (participatory contribution that people value themselves more than others in work activities), advocacy participation (reflection of controversial willingness by targeting at others in organization), Loyalty (allegiance to the group and organization) and voice (expression of constructive ideas rather than criticism or silence) have also been discussed in several fields (Farh, Zhong, W.Organ, 2004). The personality establishment for these OCBs mirrors the worker’s predispositional qualities to be agreeable, useful, mindful, and upright. The attitudinal establishment shows that workers participate in OCBs keeping in mind the end goal to respond the activities of their associations. (Luthans, Fred, 2011) Luthans (2011) said: “Motivational dimensions, job satisfaction,