Impact of Organizational Citizenship Behavior on Performance in Women's Sport Teams

Abstract

The current study examined the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior and sport team performance and the moderating role of task interdependence in that relationship. Two types of collegiate teams—softball (N = 25) and tennis (N = 15)—were utilized to represent different levels of task interdependence with softball being considered more interdependent than tennis. Athletes (N = 448) answered survey questions concerning organizational citizenship behavior (helping, civic virtue, sportsmanship [due to the historic use of the term “sportmanship” in developing the measures used in this study, that term will be used instead of “sportpersonship”]), team cohesiveness, athlete satisfaction, and transformational leadership behaviors. Researchers collected performance statistics for athletes. Results indicated that helping behavior was the strongest organizational citizenship behavior predictor of performance, but the effect differed between tennis and softball teams.

Notes

¹Softball was chosen as the high interdependent sport because one of the authors had access to softball coaches and players due to previous team participation. Women's tennis was then chosen as a comparison sport because it would be less interdependent than softball. In addition, both sports play a spring season.

²To examine whether there are differential relationships between OCBs and different performance variables (i.e., overall team win–loss percentage vs. team performance composite), we conducted the analyses with overall win–loss percentage as the performance outcome variable and results demonstrated similar patterns to the analyses conducted with the team performance composite. However, using the win–loss percentage as performance outcome attenuated the results, which may indicate that overall win–loss percentage provides a less than accurate picture of team performance compared to the team performance composite used in the present analyses.

³Complete results of the factor analyses are available upon request.