PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) on organizational effectiveness. Specifically, it investigates the impact of helping behaviour on a group where members withhold the effort on job.Design/methodology/approachResults are drawn from an agent‐based simulation model of a workgroup that has to accomplish some tasks for a specific duration.FindingsWhen there are group members withholding effort, OCB decreases organizational effectiveness; on the contrary, when individuals provide much effort in the job, OCB enhances group performance. High performance is reached by the group who are able to learn when OCB is appropriate and fitting.Research limitations/implicationsLimitations of this paper are strictly linked to the absence of empirical analysis. The simulation model provides a logical and consistent theory that needs an empirical validation.Practical implicationsThis paper helps workers and supervisors since it warns them on the OCB gap and suggests that in the place of a blind OCB, the groups need to share a smart OCB to cultivate altruism with people who work hard, and to exclude the others.Originality/valueIn the study of OCBs determinants and consequences, the academy has almost exclusively assembled on positive factors. This paper shows the OCB dark side and it asserts that citizenship effects on organization performance are not predetermined as a conceptual assumption. Effectiveness is assured by a dynamic and selective OCB only toward good workers.

CIOPS (Cognitive Inter-organizational Production System) is an agentbased model that integrates industry structural aspects and agents' cognitive characteristics. A demand-driven industry, whose profitability depends on the quality of suppliers' products, is represented by a three-stage vertically integrated industry. Four types of decision-making patterns are analyzed and confronted each other: from the simplest one (random choice) to the most complex one, which includes direct and indirect experience and reputation. They operate as selection devices supporting agents to select the best suppliers. Requiring agents' communication, indirect experience and reputation could be influenced by eventual opportunist behaviors. As the disturbing effect of falsity depends also on the size of decision and information space, the CIOPS model simulates different situations. Even though submitted to some restrictive assumptions, by testing five groups of hypotheses CIOPS model enables to fix many points that could be tested by empirical data and further developed by relaxing the assumptions. Results show that, especially in presence of reputation-based trust, cheating attitude severely damages industry profitability and the enlargement of information space dramatically strengthens the negative effects. Though indirect experience and reputation-based trust are powerful tools to improve industry profitability, when people cheat they dramatically reverses its effects. A sharp performance diversity is also evidenced between industry segments, because firms in the first tiers segment, who are also the suppliers of final producers, perform much better and more efficiently than final producers. Though industry size growth determines the negative url: www.knownetlab.it 192 L. Biggiero, E. Sevi effect of reducing performance, it produces the positive effect of shortening the time to reach the highest profitability and to stabilize it. Finally, it is also demonstrated that cheating half times determines almost the same negative impact of cheating always.

Description:The social sciences, especially economics, management, and organizational science, are experiencing a tremendous renewed interest for their epistemological and methodological statutes, as witnessed by the many books and specialized journals established during the last two decades. Relational Methodologies and Epistemology in Economics and Management Sciencesidenti es and presents the four main network-based methodologies including network analysis, Boolean network simulation modeling, arti cial neural network simulation modeling, and agentbased simulation modeling in addition to their conceptual-epistemological implications and concrete applications within the social and natural sciences.

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