Does mental health limit organizational behavior, or not? A study drawn on resource conservation

Abstract

The current study is rooted in the theory of conservation of resources, exploring the associations between mental health factors namely stress, anxiety and depression with organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive wok behavior. Data gathered from an Indian automobile sector revealed interconnections between the variables. It was found that stress, anxiety and depression have a positive relationship with OCB and stress and anxiety have negative relationship with CWB. The manuscript further evaluates the results drawing upon conservation of resources theory as we find striking differences between our hypotheses and results, and that opens up new avenues for future research.

Does mental health really matter? The dynamics of emotion and organizational behavior

“…These findings are also consistent with the negative state relief model proposed by Cialdini and Kenrick (1976) and Cialdini et al (1982) which suggested that altruistic behavior is motivated by a desire to alleviate one's own feelings of unhappiness or discontentment. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that engaging in any type of constructive behavior (such as OCBs) can help reduce stress (Jain and Cooper, 2012;Singh and Bhuvaneswari, 2023). OCB resources increase stress reactions which establishes that even a positive behavior can give rise to stress in an individual leading to a kind of coping mechanism at work in turn leading to other mental health outcomes (Bolino and Turnley, 2005;De Clercq and Belausteguigoitia, 2020).…”