Organizational, professional, and personal antecedents of organizational citizenship behavior.

摘要

This dissertation is composed of three related essays about antecedents of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). In the first essay, I study the organizational antecedents of OCB. Previous studies have identified different organizational factors that may foster OCB, but they provide little joint explanation. I develop a framework that organizes and explains the relationships among these factors. This framework suggests that OCBs result from perceptions and affects produced by organizational experiences with intrinsic and altruistic value to individuals. The model is tested with data from 220 Spanish doctors using structural equation models.; In the second essay I study how professional identification affects OCB. Previous studies frequently interpret OCBs as employee's contributions caused by a social exchange relationship of the employee with the organization or a salient part of the organization such as the superior, leader, and immediate work unit. Extraorganizational exchange relationships such as those that result from professional identification have received little attention as possible explanations of OCB. In the paper, I analyze the extra-role behaviors mentioned by Spanish doctors in twenty semi-structured interviews. I distinguish behaviors caused by professional identification from those caused by other mechanisms. I also clarify boundary ambiguities in the definition of OCB and suggest a new construct to characterize professionally motivated behaviors.; In the third essay I study the personal antecedents of OCB. Previous studies have suggested that personality characteristics should have a significant effect on OCB. The experimental results, however, are not conclusive. I propose that the lack of significant results has at least two possible explanations. The first explanation is that the measures of personality used in the past were not adequate to capture personality effects on OCB. The second explanation is that the relationship between personality and OCB may work through an intervening variable. Using the personality variables of the five factor model, I propose a model in which personality has an effect on an intervening variable that I call work preference, and work preference has an effect on OCB. This model is tested with data from 289 Spanish doctors and 77 doctors from Chicago using structural equation models.