Emotional strain and organizational citizenship behaviours: A meta-analysis and review

Abstract

This paper provides a qualitative review and quantitative summary of the relationship between emotional strain and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), and discusses five potential moderators of the strain-OCB relationship. OCB refers to discretionary behaviours that benefit organizations and their members. Emotional strain is important to consider because it has a broad impact on employee behaviours and is possibly more fundamental than other forms of strain. However, it has received less attention than aspects of job-related strain, such as job dissatisfaction. Based on the results of 29 empirical studies with 52 unique effect sizes, meta-analytic results revealed a negative relationship between strain and OCB (corrected estimate of the population correlation coefficient, ρ=−.16). Furthermore, this relationship is moderated by the type of OCB (OCB directed at the organization vs. that directed at individuals), type of organization (private vs. public), publication status (published vs. unpublished), OCB rating source (self vs. other), and type of sample (full-time employees vs. employed students). We present theoretical and practical implications of these findings, including steps that could be taken by organizations to increase OCB and to reduce emotional strain, and suggest directions for future research.

Keywords:

• Emotional strain
• organizational citizenship behaviour
• job performance
• stress
• meta-analysis

An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the 22^nd Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 2007, New York City, NY, USA.

An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the 22^nd Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 2007, New York City, NY, USA.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Fauzia Jamaluddin and Shawn Thorp for their help with the literature search and coding of articles.

Notes

An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the 22^nd Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 2007, New York City, NY, USA.