OCBs Pt 2: What are they?

by Dr Deirdre O’Donovan, Lecturer in HRM and MA HRM Course Coordinator, Cork Institute of Technology.

This is the second post in a series exploring the concept of OCBs. While subsequent posts will explore areas including the potential benefits and challenges associated with OCBs, and how OCBs relate to concepts such as Employee Engagement and Inclusion, this post focuses more particularly on defining OCB.

In 1964, Daniel Katz commented that social organisation faces a paradox, as human variability must be reduced to ensure predictability of performance, while at the same time, innovative and spontaneous activity that exceeds role requirements must also be encouraged. This continues to ring true for modern organisations who need to ensure job role activities are being fulfilled, while they also aim to maximise the performance of employees. Employee behaviours that exceed role requirements, or go beyond “the call of duty”, are often referred to in academic literature as Organisational Citizenship Behaviours (OCBs).

Although perhaps an academic term, OCBs are behaviours that are exhibited by many employees in organisations, and, much like diversity, OCB is certainly not a new concept. Back in 1938, Chester Bernard alluded to organisational behaviour via his concept of Willingness to Cooperate. Almost 30 years later, Daniel Katz (1964) discussed the importance of employees going beyond role requirements for effective organisational functioning. Shortly after, in 1966, Katz and Robert Kahn made reference to occasions where the functioning of organisations is dependent on individuals undertaking supra-role behaviours. Supra-role behaviours are those which do not directly relate to task performance or have not been prescribed advance in the job description for a role. According to the authors, supra-role behaviours include:

• Assisting others with job-related problems
• Accepting instructions without complaint
• Accepting temporary impositions without complaint
• Promoting a tolerable work climate
• Minimizing distractions caused by interpersonal conflict
• Conserving organizational resources

In 1983, Thomas Bateman and Dennis Organ termed behaviours such as those outlined by Katz and Kahn as “citizenship behaviours”, following which the construct now known as Organisational Citizenship Behaviour was explicitly coined.

As the concept is evidently not a new one, a number of definitions have been previously offered. One of the seminal definitions was provided by Organ , who defines OCB as “individual behaviour that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognised by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes effective functioning of the organization”. Based on this definition, OCBs essentially refer to contributory behaviours undertaken by individuals of their own choice, which are not required as part of their role fulfilment, and so are not practicably enforceable by organisational superiors, but often helps the organization the individual works for in some way. An important point to note in Organ’s definition is the inclusion of the word “discretionary”, indicating that OCBs are ultimately any activities that employees engage in that they do not have to. This is likely to be interpreted in the organisational setting as simply employee goodwill, relating to the opening post of this series where it was noted that many employees do engage in OCBs, but are unaware.

As the term OCB refers to a wide range of potential behaviours, the next post in this series will go deeper into identifying what OCBs may look like in organisations today.

For more, see Organ, D. W. (1988), Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books

About the author

Dr Deirdre O’Donovan is currently a lecturer in Human Resource Management in Cork Institute of Technology, Cork, Ireland, and the course coordinator for the MA in HRM. Previous research focussed on National Culture and Performance Management, while her current research interests are primarily rooted in Industrial/Organisational Psychology, Inclusion and HRM.
LinkedIn: Deirdre-O-Donovan-phd
Email: [email protected]