Collective Dynamics of Citizenship Behaviour: What Group Characteristics Promote Group‐Level Helping?

Abstract

abstract A basic tenet of research on organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is that OCB aggregated across individuals improves organizational performance. Departing from the typical focus on individual‐level OCB, the construct of group‐level OCB (GOCB) recently emerged as a critical group function that affects various group effectiveness measures. Despite the clear link between GOCB and team performance, the existing literature provides a limited understanding with regard to the antecedents of GOCB, mostly focusing on leadership variables. Establishing helping behaviour (a core dimension of OCB) as a collective construct, this study substantially expands the antecedents of group‐level helping, and empirically tests their effects using three different operationalizations of group‐level helping. The results, based on a sample of 96 work units, show that membership diversity in gender and education decreased group‐level helping, whereas diversity in tenure increased it. Group‐level helping was also positively related to leadership characteristics (supportive unit manager, transformational top management) and perceived competence of unit members. In addition, the analysis further indicated that perceived competence is a positive predictor of group‐level helping only when the unit members also believe that others are trustworthy in terms of integrity and benevolent motivation. From a methodological standpoint, the study provides important insights by comparing different ways of operationalizing collective constructs.

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