When the good outweighs the bad: organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in the workplace

ABSTRACT

Despite the claim that organizational citizenship behaviour has positive consequences for employee and organizational performances, a growing body of literature has begun to examine the potential negative consequences associated with the construct, particularly citizenship pressure that can affect work–life conflict and job stress. This paper explores organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) from another angle by considering the impact on immigrant workers. Immigrant workers play various roles in contributing towards the economy of their host countries while also working through the immigration regulations of their host country. This situation makes immigrant workers vulnerable to the negative aspects of OCB. This paper proposes a conceptual framework of OCB and concludes with a call for researchers to empirically examine the impact of schedule control, supervisor support, job stress intervention, and leadership support on citizenship pressure and organizational performance. This contribution to existing literature on OCB identifies various steps organizations can take to minimize the negative impact of OCB on their immigrant workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizational citizenship behaviour
• citizenship pressure
• immigrant workers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (KR): [Grant Number NRF-2014S1A2A2027622], the Joint Research of The NSFC-NRF Scientific Cooperation Program under grant 71311111, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (CN): [Grant Numbers 71471076, 71171099, and 71201071].