Organizational Behavior: Dimensions, Stressors, and Motivation

Organizational Citizenship Behavior

What are the 5 dimensions of Organizational Citizenship Behavior?

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) is the contribution that employees make to the overall welfare of the organization that goes beyond their required job duties.

The 5 main dimensions of citizenship behavior are:

1. Altruism: (helping behavior) willfully helping specific people with an organizationally-relevant task or problem.
2. Conscientiousness: being punctual, having attendance better than the group norm, following company rules, regulations, and procedures.
3. Courtesy: being mindful and respectful of people’s rights.
4. Sportsmanship: avoiding complaints, petty grievances, gossiping, and falsely magnifying problems.
5. Civic virtue: responsible participation in the political life of the organization, keeping abreast of current organizational issues, attending meetings, attending to in-house communications, and speaking up on issues. This is the most admirable manifestation of organizational citizenship behavior because it often entails some sacrifice of individual productivity efficiency.

Employees who exhibit pro-social behavior are highly valued by their managers. Employees who were perceived as exhibiting citizenship behaviors received higher performance evaluations and pay raises and had lower rates of absence compared to those who exhibited less citizenship behavior. OCB correlated positively with productivity and cost reduction.

Workplace Stress Sources

What are the 8 sources of workplace stress according to Sonnentag and Frese?

• Physical Stressors: stressful aspects of the environment, such as aversive working conditions.
• Task Related Stressors: aspects of one’s task that create stress, such as interruptions and monotony.
• Role Stressors: stressful aspects associated with one’s role, including role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload.
• Social Stressors: interpersonal aspects that cause stress, such as conflicts with one’s boss, bullying, and sexual harassment from a coworker.
• Work Schedule-Related Stressors: aspects about one’s work time arrangement that create stress, such as overtime or different shifts.
• Career Related Stressors: stress-inducing aspects related to one’s livelihood, including layoffs, unemployment, and lack of career opportunity.
• Traumatic Events: major incidents that cause stress, such as exposure to danger, natural disasters, and workplace homicide.
• Stressful Change Processes: stressors resulting from huge changes, such as mergers and acquisitions, and the implementation of new technology.

Note: Not all stressors work the same for people. Some people may work better under stress.

Concepts in Motivation

What are the 5 critical concepts in Motivation? How do these relate to what a person can do, will do, and is allowed to do?

• Behavior: the action from which we infer motivation.
• Performance: entails some evaluation of behavior. The basic unit of observation is behavior, but coupled with the behavior is an assessment of the behavior as judged against some standard.
• Ability: one of three determinants of behavior. It is generally regarded as fairly stable within individuals and may be represented by a broad construct like intelligence or a more specific construct like physical coordination.
• Situational Factors: the second determinant of behavior. They are environmental influences and opportunities that facilitate or constrain behavior.
• Motivation: the third determinant of behavior. You can think of ability as reflecting what you can do, motivation as what you will do, and the situational factors as what you are allowed to do.