Citizenship Performance: An Integrative Review and Motivational Analysis

Abstract

The importance of job performance to human resource management and personnel research is considerable. In fact, it has been described as the "ultimate dependent variable" in industrial/organizational psychology (Organ & Paine, 1999). Early attempts to understand job performance focused on measurable work output and task performance. However, in the course of the past 20 years, our understanding of job performance has broadened. Member contributions to the organization that go beyond task performance have received increasing research attention. Several converging lines of research have explored these "softer" aspects of performance, proposing constructs such as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB; Organ, 1988; Smith, Organ, & Near, 1983), civic virtue (Graham, 1986), prosocial organizational behavior (FOB; Brief & Motowidlo, 1986), organizational spontaneity (George & Brief, 1992), and contextual performance (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993). This research has also demonstrated the importance of these additional aspects of performance. For example, when supervisors make overall performance ratings, they weight these behaviors heavily (e.g., Motowidlo & Van Scotter, 1994), and organizational effectiveness has been shown to be related to these additional aspects of job performance (e.g., Podsakoff & MacKenzie, 1994). Today's organizations face global competition. Many are moving toward more flexible workforces and team-based organizational structures. In this environment, a broader understanding of job performance is likely to become increasingly important. This chapter describes the major constructs that have been proposed in this area and attempts to integrate and summarize research results, including research exploring antecedents and consequences.

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