A Study Of Antecedents Of Organizational Citizenship Behavior: A Multilevel View

Employees'organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is very important for facilitating the function of organizations. Recently, there is a growing number of researches exploring how to promote not only individual employees'but also groups'OCB. With the framework of multi-level theory and social cognition theory, this study analyzed the multilevel factor structure of OCB, explored the antecedents of both individual-level and unit-level OCB, and examined the underlying mechanisms through which these antecedents influence OCB.Four studies were implemented. The purpose of the pilot study was to validate the reliabilities and validities of measures used in the following studies. Based on cross-level models, Study 1 examined the moderate effect of group characteristics on the relationship between personal characteristics and individual-level OCB in a sample of 263 members from 62 groups. Study 2 explored the multilevel factor structure of OCB with a sample of 341 members from 68 groups. Based on unit-level model, Study 3 explored the direct influences and mediation roles of group characteristics on unit-level OCB, as well as the moderate effect of consistency of group characteristics on the relationship between group characteristics and OCB. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM), Multilevel Covariance Structure Analysis (MCA) and other statistics methods were used for multi-level data analysis.The results of Study 1 indicated that, first, conscientiousness, extraversion, procedural justice and descriptive norms were positively related to individual-level OCB, but not agreeableness, servant leadership and injunctive norms; Second, the relationships between agreeableness, extraversion, servant leadership, injunctive norms and individual-level OCB were moderated by group cohesion. These relationships became significantly weaker when group cohesion was high than when group cohesion was low; Third, the relationship between agreeableness and individual-level OCB was moderated by descriptive norms. The relationship was significantly stronger when descriptive norms was high than when descriptive norms was low.The results of Study 2 were as the following: (1) the theoretical four-factor structure of OCB was confirmed on the individual level as well as the unit level; (2) the two-factor structure model resulted in the best model fit on the unit-level OCB. One of the two factors was the self domain, and the other factor was the non-self domain which was consisted of group, organization and society domains; (3) the reliability and validity of unit-level OCB measurement were better than that of individual-level OCB.In Study 3, we found that, (1) procedural justice climate, group cohesion, servant leadership, descriptive norms and injunctive norms had a positive effect on unit-level OCB; (2) The consistency of group cohesive moderated the relationship between group cohesive and unit-level OCB. When the consistency was high, there was a significant positive relationship between group cohesion and unit-level OCB.However, when the consistency was low, the relationship between group cohesion and unit-level OCB became non-significant; (3) the relationship between servant leadership and unit-level OCB was fully mediated by procedural justice climate and group cohesion.