Who Helps and Why? Contextualizing Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Employees use organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) to achieve different functions: some OCB reflects altruistic motivations to help one's organisation or coworkers, and some OCB reflects self-serving impression management motivations. Across 2 samples (Ns = 191 and 189), we contextualize functional (i.e., goal-directed) OCB with respect to dispositional and situational factors. Other-serving OCB was more common among employees higher on Honesty-Humility, Extraversion, Conscientiousness. and Agreeableness, and in workplaces with transformational (intrinsically motivating) leaders and low perceptions of politics. In contrast. all forms of self-serving OCB (i.e., OCB for impression management purposes) were more common among employees low in Honesty-Humility, and some forms of self-serving OCB were more common in more political workplaces (high perceptions of politics). These findings extend the theoretical and practical benefits of a functional approach to OCB, where employees use OCB to achieve different goals-namely, to serve or to receive recognition-within different social and material reward systems.