Do managers need to distinguish the surface altruistic behavior

Abstract

Good political skills can help subordinates disguise their ingratiation as organizational citizenship behavior. Few studies has told us what measures should be taken when the managers can't tell the difference between organizational citizenship behavior and ingratiation. In this paper, survey data were collected at two different time points from 338 subordinate and 128 their supervisors from 6 electronic manufacturing enterprises located in Beijing, china. The conclusion of this paper is that when the leaders make sure their subordinates trust in themselves and they can't make sure such kind of behavior is organizational citizenship behavior or ingratiation behavior, they should encourage such surface altruistic behaviors recurring, because their subordinates' behaviors are good for job performance and colleagues.