The impact of gender ideology on the performance of gender-congruent citizenship behaviors

ABSTRACT

Because organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) performance contributes to overall performance ratings and failure to perform expected behaviors detracts from performance ratings, it is important to examine whether men and women perform OCBs in stereotypically expected ways. Published studies have evidenced both a presence and an absence of gender differences in OCB performance. With a view to explaining this ambiguity, this article reports the results of a study examining gender ideology as a moderator of the effects of gender on the performance of gender-congruent OCBs (i.e., helping for women and civic virtue for men). Survey data from participants and their coworkers across a wide range of jobs and organizations revealed that gender ideology moderated the effects of gender on the performance of gender-congruent OCBs.

Acknowledgments

This work was completed in part while the first author was a doctor student at Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada.

Notes

1. Note, however, that once information is provided that the target is a gay male or lesbian, these gender stereotypes tend to be inverted (i.e., gay men are presumed to be feminine and lesbians are presumed to be masculine; Blashill & Powlishta, 2009) or seen as androgynous (Clarke & Arnold, 2017).

2. The AWS–Short Version consists of 25 items. We ran an exploratory principle axis factor analysis with varimax rotation and uncovered two factors with eigenvalues greater than 1. We discovered that one factor was composed of the 12 items that represented egalitarian attitudes and the second factor comprised 13 items reflective of traditional attitudes. The two factors were highly negatively correlated, however; the internal consistency of Factor 2 was lower than that of Factor 1. Further, Factor 1 contained more work-related items, and research suggests that people can have different gender ideologies with respect to different domains (i.e., a person could have an egalitarian attitude toward the division of labor in the workplace but a traditional attitude toward the division of labor at home; Davis & Greenstein, 2009). For all of these reasons we chose to carry out the analysis with Factor 1 rather than the entire scale.

3. The analysis with and without centering of the predictor variables yields identical results for significant tests of the interactions. The noncentered results are reported here. Aside from job gender type, potential control variables and demographics were found to be insignificant individual predictors of OCB. Nonetheless, nonreported regression analyses were also conducted with these variables entered into the first block. Because they also did not account for significant variability as a set, they were omitted for the tests of hypotheses.