Decelerating the diminishing returns of citizenship on task performance: The role of social context and interpersonal skill.

Abstract

Recent scholarship on citizenship behavior demonstrates that engaging too often in these behaviors comes at the expense of task performance. In order to examine the boundary conditions of this relationship, we used resource allocation and social exchange theories to build predictions regarding moderators of the curvilinear association between citizenship and task performance. We conducted a field study of 366 employees, in which we examined the relationship between the frequency of interpersonal helping behavior and task performance and tested for the moderating influences of 3 social context features (social density, interdependence, and social support) and of employees' levels of interpersonal skill. Results provided corroborating evidence of the diminishing returns between citizenship and task performance. Further, these diminishing returns were decelerated when contexts were characterized by high interdependence and social density and when employees possessed strong interpersonal skills. Implications for extending future citizenship theory and research to incorporate curvilinearity are presented.

Antecedents and consequences of transfer of training in public sector organizations

“…Contextual performance is the individual's positive behavior in the work that is not directly related to the job but can support the achievement of work performance and provide benefit to the organization. The forms of contextual performance are among others, citizenship behavior (organizational citizenship behavior/OCB), helping behavior, and social behavior (Ellington et al 2014). Task performance was positive behavior of individuals in the work related to the implementation and completion of tasks.…”

Help yourself by helping others: The joint impact of group member organizational citizenship behaviors and group cohesiveness on group member objective task performance change

“…identifying antecedents, recent efforts have focused on exploring performance outcomes of OCB (e.g., Ellington, Dierdorff, & Rubin, 2014;Podsakoff, Whiting, Podsakoff, & Mishra, 2011;Rapp, Bachrach, & Rapp, 2013;Rubin, Dierdorff, & Bachrach, 2013). However, a meta-analytic review of OCB indicates that very few studies have set out to investigate the mediators that connect a group member's OCB to changes in that member's task performance (Podsakoff, Whiting, Podsakoff, & Blume, 2009).…”

Hope and human capital enhance job engagement to improve workplace outcomes

“…A 1-month lag was determined to be long enough to reduce the likelihood of remembering previous responses, to reduce the influence of common contextual cues and to decrease the consistency motif but not short enough to observe the expected effects of predictors on our endogenous variables (Podsakoff et al, 2012). Previous research has used around a 1-month lag for studying job engagement, task performance, and OCBs (Ellington, Dierdorff, & Rubin, 2014;Hernandez & Guarana, 2018). We also used different, not common, scale anchors in our survey questionnaires.…”