Analyzing Three Articles On Organizational Citizenship Behaviour

Similarities between the Articles

Question:

Discuss about the Organizational Citizenship Behaviour.

In industrial and organizational psychology, organizational citizenship behaviour or organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is a person's voluntary commitment within an organization or company that is not part of his or her contractual tasks. The objective of this report is to discuss and analyse the three articles of organizational citizenship behaviour. The articles are:

1.Exploring the dark side of organizational citizenship behavior

2.Organizational citizenship behavior in work groups: A team cultural perspective

• The costs of exhibiting organizational citizenship behavior

            The paper would discuss the similarities and differences between the articles and the paper would also discuss the integrated and common view from the articles. The similarities between the articles can be discussed as:

One of the similarities between these articles is the effective and efficient use of literature review. All the authors did a detailed literature review. Another similarity is the focus on employee development as part of organizational behavior. All the authors accepted that organizational development couldn’t happen without employee development. Therefore, it is important that employees’ goals and objectives should match with the organizational goal and objectives.

All the authors agreed that the idea of organizational citizenship behaviour are inherently positive. Authors agree upon the single point that the idea and notion of organizational citizenship behaviour does more positive and negative. Obviously there exist a negative or the dark side of organizational citizenship behaviour; however, it is not something that could not be avoided. All the authors also tend to agree on the part that organizational citizenship behaviour would have positive relationship with the performance of the employees and performance ratings given to them. It is expected that a healthy organizational citizenship behavior should have a positive impact on employee performance. There also exist some differences in these articles. The differences in these three articles can be discussed as:

There are not much of the differences between these three articles. There is some difference in the approach of authors towards the research. In the article, ‘Exploring the dark side of organizational citizenship behavior’, authors did a detailed analysis of organizational citizenship behaviour and they based their research on three assumptions. In the article, ‘Organizational citizenship behavior in work groups: A team cultural perspective’, authors have taken a case study approach. The case study around organizational citizenship behavior is developed and an effective literature review is done. his study examines how OCB influences job performance ratings within different team cultures, as measured by team collectivism and individualism. Authors collected the data from 81 teams working for a multinational bank in Hong Kong. In the article, ‘The costs of exhibiting organizational citizenship behavior’, authors started the article with a hypothesis. In the article, authors did the hypothesis testing through literature review in the area of organizational citizenship behavior. In this article, authors were more focused to link organizational citizenship behavior with job performance.

One thing that can be reconciled from the articles is value creation for different stakeholders in the organization. To fully understand this definition of value creation it is important to understand what is known as capitals. In an organizational setting, capital can be defined as financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social and relationship, and natural capital. It is from these capitals that value can be created or indeed destroyed. An organizations business model seeks to combine, transform and leverage on these capitals to create value for the organisation. Value can also be created for other stakeholders like customers, the general public etc. In the article, ‘Exploring the dark side of organizational citizenship behavior’ authors made the statement that the organizational culture has to encourage knowledge sharing across the organization. In this context, the cycle of organizational learning can be observed, however, since it is based on repetitive tasks, the knowledge has been institutionalized in the organization and the role of the new employee is to learn already established knowledge ingrained into the department. Furthermore, the interest on both parties to convey the information is important, as this is a crucial stage of the employee to learn the organization; procedures, culture, etc.  

Differences between the Articles

Organizational development through smooths knowledge acquisition and eventually transfer of learning between the same organisation employees and also between different borders and countries is made only possible by today’s highly technological software. It is important to mention that intuition is an implicit part of organizational citizenship behavior exhibited by leaders. Intuiting: which is the process where organization individuals develop their own new insights and ideas. In this process, Line-of-business software can support by capturing the business daily transaction then extract patterns and trends and generate reports that are used to build insights about business operations and support new ideas generation. It is also important to mention that knowledge management is also and important part of organizational citizenship behavior. such process, knowledge management solution could be used to exploit existing knowledge and ingrate it with the new knowledge, performance management solutions to capture and analyze the KPIs related to the application of learning outcomes, and project management solutions to plan and manage the implementation of the learning outcomes and related initiatives.

All the authors agreed that trust is the key to establish a healthy organization. If there is no trust, organization cannot get an employee to share its knowledge. Trust paves way for employees to open up themselves to the organization growth of which knowledge sharing is one of them. Another useful information is the use of principles like job rotation. Rotation as a means of ingrained organizational knowledge seem to be very practical because every employee get the opportunity to understand each unit individually and how it interconnect with the mission of the department. Thus, increasing (possible) commitment.  Rotation, however, may also create stagnation because the tasks are performed based on what is learned and there is no incentive or motivation to do it differently. Therefore, in relation to organizational learning and the 4i's framework, the department remains at a stage where the knowledge learned is institutionalized and there is no mean for the cycle of learning to be repeated. Additionally, the responsibility of conveying or transferring the correct knowledge to the employee in the new unit is immense as not always the information is conveyed in a correct manner; interrupting organizational learning through this means to be inadequate. The observation is that some personnel may refuse to share knowledge (precisely) because it is interpreted that by sharing the knowledge he/she may release his/her power to the next individual. In so, in organizations where the nature of the job is repetitive is important to accompany job rotation (for organizational learning), which can be very beneficial to the organization, with other tools to ensure knowledge transfer is accurate. 

Another common point among the articles is that the leaders should be intuitive for effective organizational culture. In an organizational setting, the individual act need to have very clear vision on the environment the organization are operating, and aside of that the individual act which is the intuition also need to know what are acceptance level of staff in his team or organization in dealing with new opinion, because if the staff intuition will not be welcome among the team than staff intuition will not reach anywhere.

Value Creation for Different Stakeholders in the Organization

One may be led to believe that Structural and leadership barriers can affect organizational learning based on organizational culture or the belief of individuals. For example women leadership. Male dominance is said to be the greatest obstacle encountered by women rising to top positions. The "gender role " issue based on societies belief is said to have prevented may women from climbing the corporate ladder, "the glass ceiling" has created limitations “the old-boy network is said to create a barrier to prevent women from entering top management and another barrier is "sex discrimination" that may imply that women may not be aggressive enough to take on a particular position. Due to these barriers women are encouraged to have their own businesses in order to experience the leadership role. Hewlett-Packard had elected a female leader in 1999 that believed that this barrier was broken until after seven years it was stated that she admitted to being a victim of sexism. Organizations have mentioned that they are losing talent as women may leave and seek opportunities that will help the to break "the glass ceiling. The organizations must be cautious to use the integration of knowledge in an effective manner. It is important that organizational citizenship behavior should be established as a culture in the organization. The culture should be established from top down to bottom up manner. The leaders should take the responsibility to establish the organizational citizenship culture.

The key things learned from article are that organizational culture should be the key thing for senior management. In this era of globalization, employees often have work together with the employees of different regions. Let’s apply the organizational citizenship and cultural perspective to an outsourcing example. For instance, in an organization, consultants are employed for a specific period of time, either in Information Technology department or other services.  Within this period, they will share their knowledge and expertise on the particular area in which they are specialized and when they are done, they will leave and the employees of that department will have the knowledge of such task and how to go about it. It happened when the company wants to upgrade the flex-cube software for operations department, certain experts on (IT) from India were employed for the number of weeks and months the tasks lasted. It is important that organizations should have a thorough understanding of internal and external environment before making any decision. The concepts of organizational citizenship behavior could also be applied to small and large organizations. It is critical that the organizations should have the plan to make continuous improvement in the organization through organizational citizenship behavior. The organizations should also have a long term plan in place with respect to organizational citizenship behavior. The plan would ensure that organization is able to

Conclusion

A lot of learning can be made from these three articles. The subject of organizational citizenship behavior is particularly more important for contemporary environment in globalized environment. When we talk of Technology, we think of globalization with all the good things that came with it as the act of globalization has made the world to be a global village. One of the benefits of globalization to the world in general is the technology innovation which has made every economy a connecting village to the other, Wu, (2012) Said “Globalization is an ongoing process of the flow of capital, information, labour, technology, and goods across national boundaries to form an interconnected global economy”. Though as it has the advantage which it has brought to the world same also it has its bad side effects on some economies. Without the Information or communication technology, the access to organizational strategic alliance will not be visible and favorable as their will be much hindrance both in learning and communication thereby hinders the knowledge sharing. When it’s not shared among the employees for organizational usage and their own personal purpose it brings down a lot of organizational competitiveness. Finally, when it comes to visual employees, Information Technology has been their only source of easy and fast organizational learning including communication between them and their head office with other subsidiaries. For instance, in my organization, the invent of technology has been a tool that brought the entire subsidiaries in one umbrella, in the sense that it provided solution for video conference organizational training among the whole subsidiaries which makes it easy to reach all in one bit and saves costs, time and stress in travelling for the management and not only that it has improved in the competitive advantage of the company. It can be said that the organizations must use the new avenues of Information Technology to manage its operation and to ensure high level of organization citizenship behavior.

References

Bolino, M.C., Klotz, A.C., Turnley, W.H. and Harvey, J., 2013. Exploring the dark side of organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34(4), pp.542-559.

Deery, S., Rayton, B., Walsh, J. and Kinnie, N., 2016. The Costs of Exhibiting Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Human Resource Management.

Lai, J.Y., Lam, L.W. and Lam, S.S., 2013. Organizational citizenship behavior in work groups: A team cultural perspective. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34(7), pp.1039-1056.