How India defines organizational citizenship behaviour: an inductive study from an employee perspective

Abstract

Purpose

Organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) holds importance for employees and employers. Although it is culturally relativistic, its definition is West-dominated. Conceptual investigations in non-Western cultures yield different dimensions of OCB. Existing OCB models lack contemporariness and reciprocity. Their perspective may be biased towards management. Practice based on such theory gives poor outcomes. To address these gaps, the authors reconceptualized OCB in the Indian context from an employee perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted a qualitative study to build an employee-centric, inductive OCB model. The authors briefed respondents about the meaning of OCB and sought descriptions of instances of OCB performed or witnessed by them. The authors collected 478 descriptions from 49 private sector employees in India. The thematic analysis developed ten themes, each an OCB component, organized into four super-themes, denoting interpersonal, individual, organizational and community orientations.

Findings

Five OCB components are new emic additions by the model: Building social relationships, emotionally mature behaviour, learning and knowledge creation, housekeeping and event management, and higher order citizenship. Organizational governance participation is absent from the model. Housekeeping and relationship building are the most appearing OCBs, while voice is the least. Findings are discussed in relation to temporal and cultural background, respondent characteristics and perspective.

Practical implications

Organizations can better support employee OCBs by acknowledging OCBs unique to India, investigating low proportions of voice and civic virtue in the Indian model and informing people policies with this new knowledge.

Originality/value

This is the first attempt to build an inductive model of OCB in India from the employee perspective, making significant contributions to organizational theory and practice.

Citation

Deshmukh, A. and Natu, S. (2023), "How India defines organizational citizenship behaviour: an inductive study from an employee perspective", International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, Vol. 26 No. 3, pp. 165-184. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOTB-08-2022-0163

Introduction

Organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is employee behaviour that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by a formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effectiveness of the organization (Organ, 1997). Research into OCB stemmed from Organ's attempt to investigate the link between job satisfaction and performance that research failed to establish but practitioners and managers swore by. He proposed that the link could be perceived when the definition of performance also included voluntary efforts of employees that went beyond the prescribed job role. This extra factor was named by Bateman and Organ (1983) as OCB. Further work led to the emergence of a five-dimensional model of OCB: Altruism (helping behaviour), compliance (adherence to rules and standards of the organization), sportsmanship (tolerating inconveniences for the organization), civic virtue (participation in organizational governance) and courtesy (anticipatory prevention of conflict and problems at work) (Smith et al., 1983; Williams and Anderson, 1991; Konovsky and Organ, 1996). This became the most popular conceptualization of OCB.

High levels of OCB in an organization predict multiple desirable outcomes, including greater productivity, higher sales (Podsakoff and Mackenzie, 1997), greater organizational effectiveness (Kumari and Thapliyal, 2017), higher efficiency and profitability (Podsakoff et al., 2009), reduced turnover of employees (Chen et al., 1998; Nadiri and Tanova, 2010) and higher employee engagement and satisfaction (Sharma et al., 2011; Rurkkhum and Bartlett, 2012). OCB is key to ensuring a productive organization, satisfied employees and a healthy organizational culture. This makes it worthwhile to study, assess and promote OCB, for which a clear and relevant conceptual foundation of OCB is a prerequisite. We find the current conceptualizations lacking in terms of contemporariness, reciprocal perspective and cultural contextualization to India. In further paragraphs, we explain each of these three factors that propelled this study.

First, the original concept of OCB and its dimensions were developed almost 40 years ago, when the world of work was focused upon manufacturing or assembly line employees, and ways of extracting maximum productivity from them. Since then, humankind has experienced a technological revolution, more awareness about the psychology of employees and increase in the share of service, knowledge and technology jobs that are harder to define or measure. Changing industry trends in the 21st century have necessitated a redefinition of citizenship behaviour (Dekas et al., 2013; Harvey et al., 2018).

We began by studying the primary term in OCB—citizen. The word comes from Civitas, meaning the body of people constituting a state, and Denizen, meaning a native organism. In the political sense, citizenship is more than the mere attribute of residing in a region. It involves legal recognition of membership of a state, entitlements ascribed by the membership, and responsibilities and political participation towards the state, all in the context of being governed by the powers ruling that state (Bellamy, 2008; Chouinard, 2009). It follows that citizen and state do or should have a reciprocal relationship. The definition of and discourse around organizational citizenship, however, has been focused on the responsibilities or participation of the citizens (employees) more than on the responsibility of the member organization, that is, the employer. Unlike political citizenship that entails a permanent status and guaranteed rights, employees rarely have a permanent membership of the organization, especially with the employment-at-will norm. Employers are not required to guarantee employee rights or privileges unless external authorities or the government enforce such mandates or the privileges are collectively bargained for and included in the contracts. OCBs, by definition, are outside the scope of contracts. Thus, the traditional view of organizational citizenship fails to recognize a reciprocal relationship between the employee and the employer.

The methodology employed by Organ and other early researchers of OCB involved gathering information from managers about their subordinates' citizenship behaviours. Managers and employers are the beneficiaries of OCBs and stand more powerful than employees, the performers of OCBs. Managers define subordinates' jobs more broadly than the subordinates do; they consider many employee behaviours as in-role that employees perceive as extra-role (Lam et al., 1999). Managers can even exert pressure on employees and compel them to perform citizenship behaviours (Vigoda-Gadot, 2006). The conceptualizations of OCB emerging from managerial responses would naturally be tilted in favour of the beneficiaries of OCB and narrower in scope.

Despite the normative and instrumental importance of the employee as a stakeholder, organizational behaviour research mostly serves the interests of managers and employers and pays little attention to the views of employees (Graham and Tarbell, 2006; Coyle-Shapiro and Shore, 2007). Existing theories of OCB align with this top-down stance, ignoring employees' views (Smith et al., 1983; Morrison, 1994). This has contributed to less reciprocal theories of OCB, too. The discourse around OCB needs paradigmatic changes to rectify that, and sourcing data from employees to reconceptualize OCB from their perspective is an important step in this journey. Such a conceptualization is expected to be broader and more comprehensive than existing models; to offer new knowledge about the nature of OCB from the unique standpoint of employees from their sociopolitical position in the organization; and to more adequately explain related concepts and outcomes of OCB that previous theories may have fallen short in doing. We attempt to achieve such a conceptualization by analysing OCB descriptions given by employees. Thus, developing the model from an employee perspective is our second rationale.

The third rationale is to conceptualize OCB for the Indian cultural context. The unexamined transfer of Western organization theories to India has led to inconsistent research findings, difficulty in understanding Indian organizational behaviour, and organizational ineffectiveness and inefficiencies (Kanungo and Jaeger, 1990; Gupta and Panda, 2009). Hence, the indigenization movement in psychological research calls for theorization specific to local context. Such theories take the cultural lens to explain organizational phenomena, including OCB, more potently than imposed Western theories.

National culture makes a difference to how OCB is defined, which of its dimensions are considered important, how high or low employees score on OCB and how OCB is related to other concepts. Some dimensions of OCB are emic (culture-specific), and Western theories are deficient in explaining citizenship behaviours in other cultures (Farh et al., 2008; Organ, 2018). Searching dimensions of OCB within a culture is an exploratory goal, best accomplished by qualitative research methods (Berry et al., 2011; Dekas et al., 2013). Such model-building studies have rarely been conducted in cultures other than US, Australian, Chinese and Japanese national cultures (Farh et al., 2008; Organ, 2018). In a first attempt of the kind, we have inductively built an Indian context model of OCB.

Summing up, the present study aims to develop a new dimensional model of OCB specific to the Indian cultural context in current times, from the perspective of the employee rather than the management, using qualitative methods. Existing models of OCB and cultural differences in conceptualization of OCB with a special focus on Indian context have been reviewed below.

A critical review of existing models of organizational citizenship

Conventional Western models

Initial research in OCB occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with the Cold War and inflation in the United States. The metaphors and nomenclature used by early researchers seem influenced by a heightened sense of patriotism. For instance, the behaviour is named “citizenship”; and a conceptual article by Organ about OCB is titled “The Good Soldier Syndrome.” However, Organ's theorization does not borrow any insights from political philosophy and uses political terms in a superficial manner. In fact, as pointed out by Kark and Waismel-Manor (2005) in their feminist reading of the concept of OCB, the term citizenship behaviour was arbitrarily coined by Bateman and Organ (1983) “for lack of a better one” (p. 895).

The bad economy and inflation of 1980s may have reflected in Organ and his collaborators' research intent, as organizations may have been interested in non-monetary motivators for employees and voluntary contributions by employees. This era also saw the rise of neoliberal economic policies, which have since been criticized for increasing inequalities and reducing the power of employee unions. The neoliberal outlook reflects in the researchers' methodology, as they focused on the management perspective to conceptualize OCB. Despite drawbacks, Organ's model has been the most popular one on which to build further research.

Graham (1989, c.f. Moorman and Blakely, 1995) proposed a four-dimension model of OCB: Interpersonal helping, which is similar to the altruism dimension in Organ's proposition; individual initiative, which consists of communications in the workplace aimed at improving group performance; personal industry, which means performing tasks beyond the call of duty; and loyal boosterism, which means maintaining the reputation of the organization with outsiders. Although details of the method for developing this framework are not available, confirmatory factor analysis has supported the structure (Graham, 1989, c.f. Moorman and Blakely, 1995). This conceptualization of OCB showed a positive correlation with a collectivistic attitude at the individual level. However, there is no clear rationale for its dimensions; they may be representing yet another classification of employee contributions, whether voluntary or involuntary.

Van Dyne and LePine (1998) asked employees, peers and supervisors to rate items adapted from previous works in the area of OCB. Results supported two separate promotive extra-role behaviours: Helping, defined as small promotive acts of consideration, termed as affiliative OCB; and voice, meaning constructively challenging the status quo in the organization, termed as challenging OCB. They picked these two dimensions from a more comprehensive model of extra-role behaviour that also included dissent and whistle-blowing. While this conceptualization includes possibly negative behaviour like voice that Organ does not fully endorse as citizenship (Organ, 2018), it excludes some important other OCBs such as teamwork and participation in the organization's governance. Van Dyne and LePine considered employees' views in this model although merely in the form of rating items that emerged from literature focused on the employer perspective.

The boundaries between in-role and extra-role behaviour are dynamic and situational. Hence, Graham (1991) adapted the political concept of civic citizenship and proposed organizational citizenship, which covered all positive employee behaviours, including core performance. This conceptualization had three main dimensions: organizational obedience involved respecting rules and regulations, and an orientation towards organizational structure; organizational loyalty was defined as identification with and allegiance to organizational leaders and the organization as a whole; and organizational participation was defined as interest in organizational affairs guided by ideal standards of virtue, such as volunteering opinions and questioning popular opinion for the good of the organization. A tool based on this framework was validated and found a supporting factor structure (Van Dyne et al., 1994). This tool contained obedience items adapted from existing conscientiousness items (Smith et al., 1983), and loyalty and participation items created inductively from employee focus groups. The model is backed by rigorous theory and statistical data, and has an original view of citizenship. It has the merit of employee contribution in creating items for OCB, though the behaviour categories were pre-decided. The model did not gain as much traction as Organ's, possibly because the heft of political concepts makes it less friendly to management practitioners. The model is also less granular, with categories covering a range of behaviours that could further be divided.

New-age Western models

Two recent OCB models having novel approaches are reviewed here. The first is a conceptualization that combines OCB with performance (Griffin et al., 2007; Carpini and Parker, 2018). Griffin's model of employee performance presents a 3 × 3 matrix, with three forms of behaviour (proficiency, adaptivity and proactivity) combined with three targets of the contribution (individual task, team member, and organization member behaviours). With rising uncertainty in the organization, employee performance goes from proficiency (anticipated and formalized behaviours) to adaptivity (responding to or coping with change) and to proactivity (initiative and foresighted behaviours). Each OCB is claimed to fit in one of the nine categories in the matrix; for example, helping a co-worker is a team member proficiency behaviour as it is targeted at a peer and can be anticipated or formalized. The model claims to subsume OCB, making its separate existence moot. However, voice and individual initiative might not fit well within this model, as they are present across all levels of target of contribution in the proactivity form. Some OCBs classified as proficient might also include elements of proactivity, making it difficult to separate OCBs from performance (Griffin et al., 2007; Carpini and Parker, 2018). In drawing together separate research lines of performance and extra-role contributions, this conceptualization makes behaviour categories dynamic but ignores the cultural and contextual specificity of OCB.

In a study conducted with employees at Google Inc., Dekas et al. (2013) developed a model and a measure of OCB for knowledge workers (OCB-KW). Through focus groups, coding and methods akin to Q-sort, they inductively developed five dimensions of OCB: Employee sustainability, defined as efforts to maintain or improve health and well-being of self or other employees; social participation, defined as participation in non-core social activities during the workday; civic virtue, defined as activities showing a macro-level interest or belongingness to the organization; voice, defined as efforts with an intent to improve organization's products or functioning; and helping, defined as voluntary help to co-workers for work-related issues. Three additional themes of knowledge sharing, individual initiative, and administrative behaviour were discarded due to low representation. They sourced data directly from employees and justified their intent by describing several aspects of the nature of work that are constantly evolving and therefore need newer theorizations in organizational behaviour. Cultural context is a strong influencer of OCB (Paine and Organ, 2000). A common limitation for all of the models reviewed above is their specificity to Western contexts that restrict their generalizability and explaining power in non-Western cultures.

Cultural differences in defining organizational citizenship

The pioneering OCB conceptualization in a non-Western culture used qualitative methods to analyse examples of OCB collected from Chinese employees and found that the resulting framework differed from the Western model (Farh et al., 1997). Dimensions of identification with the company, altruism towards colleagues and conscientiousness were common between the two models and were termed as “etic” (universally common) dimensions. Sportsmanship and courtesy were found to be absent from the Chinese conceptualization, while interpersonal harmony and protecting company resources were new dimensions absent in the Western notion. These differences were explained in relation to three cultural and institutional characteristics of China (Farh et al., 2004): salience of interpersonal relationships, state domination and broad definition of performance. In their findings, dimensions of OCB unique to China were found to be social welfare participation and compliance with social norms. These scholars addressed the deficiency of existing theorizations by developing a culture-specific model of OCB and showing its interconnectedness with the culture. Their final model had eleven dimensions, each adding to its originality and practicality.

Lo and Ramayah (2009) focused on the Malaysian manufacturing sector and found that the sportsmanship dimension was absent from the definition of OCB in that cultural context. Lam et al. (1999) reported that OCB was defined differently by participants from Japan and Hong Kong than by participants from the United States and Australia. These works further underline cultural differences in conceptualizing OCB although they were limited by existing theory due to a deductive approach.

In a comprehensive review of cross-cultural and global research into OCB, Farh et al. (2008) describe in depth the Chinese inductive study mentioned above and state that most of their summarizing conclusions are based on comparisons between China and the United States, due to lack of similar research in other cultural contexts.

The Indian context

Culture and practices of the organization strongly resemble those of the nation or society in which the organization is situated (House et al., 2004; c.f. Berry et al., 2011), but there are also clusters of organizations in some countries including India that reject national culture (Nelson and Gopalan, 2003). Traditionally, India has ascribed a lower status to labour (Sinha, 1994); but with global influences and a coexistence of mixed values (Tripathi, 1990), the new generations may have internalized a different work ethic.

India has high power distance, signifying unequal power distribution and strong hierarchies. It is high on masculinity, emphasizing achievement and competition, and moderately high on collectivism, showing importance of relationships and group memberships for work behaviour (Hofstede, 2021). According to Trompenaars' (1993) cultural dimensions, Indian culture is externalist, stressing on flexibility and compromise. It is also more affective and diffuse, requiring human connection in business relationships and avoiding separation of emotions from work (Browaeys and Price, 2015). This has important implications for what is perceived by Indian employees as in-role behaviour and what is termed as voluntary effort. On the one hand, we may expect them to broaden the concept of OCB by including the most trivial actions that they see as “extra effort” that hoists them up higher in the competitive environment. On the other hand, many interpersonal OCBs may be seen as part of the job as a team member, due to the cultural emphasis on emotions and relationships. High power distance might exclude voice and constructive feedback from the list of positive behaviours.

A culture-specific tool to measure OCB was constructed and standardized for the Indian context (Pattanayak et al., 2003), but its items were inspired by an existing OCB measure. Factor analysis on the response data extracted three factors, which the authors named sharing and involvement (interaction between employees about organizational issues and their solutions), organizational ownership (devotion and responsibility toward organization and its resources) and professional commitment (high standard of performance in order to reach organizational goals).

Gupta and Singh (2012) used a combination of items from existing OCB scales (Smith et al., 1983; Konovsky and Organ, 1996) and performed factor analysis on employee responses. They found that Organ's model of OCB was a poor fit in the Indian context, proposing a new structure of three factors: Organization orientation (helping, sportsmanship and civic virtue from Organ's model), punctuality (compliance with the organization's timings) and individual orientation (concern about the impact of one's actions on other individuals). A similar approach was taken by Shanker (2014) and Habeeb (2019), who both used an OCB scale based on Organ's model and performed factor analysis to determine the structure of OCB in the Indian context. While Habeeb focused on the banking and financial sector, Shanker collected her data from middle and senior management across industries. Both reported substantial quantitative support for Organ's model in India. Gupta (2021) found factor analytic evidence for the same in the teaching sector in India.

OCB has mostly been studied quantitatively in India, using existing western tools. Efforts to customize a model for the Indian context have resulted in assessing fitment of existing models to Indian employees, and measurement tools heavily borrowing from Western measures. Even studies that came up with new OCB dimensions for Indian settings were limited by the use of items originating from Western measures. There is a significant gap for qualitative, inductive research aimed at deriving original dimensions of OCB for India that are rooted in ground-level data from employees. Such research could construe new OCBs and discard some existing OCBs. We conducted the present study to fill this gap and expect our findings to inform the academic discourse, human resource policies and cross-cultural management practices. More importantly, the study will set a precedent for reconceptualizing OCB in different contexts from different perspectives.

Methodology

To newly conceptualize OCB, we designed an inductive study with purely qualitative methods of data collection and analysis. Our model of OCB was developed from descriptions of real instances of OCB. This method was inspired by the methodology of milestone studies in OCB conceptualization ( Farh et al., 2004; Dekas et al., 2013).

Sampling

We employed convenience sampling to recruit full-time employees working in India. We approached potential respondents through our social circle, contacting employees directly or through their colleagues and managers. We snowballed the sample to recruit more respondents through existing ones, until the data reached saturation. We gathered responses from 49 employees, mostly in white-collar and technology-based jobs (see Table 1).

Inclusion criteria:

1. Citizen and resident of India

2. Full-time salaried employee of an organization

3. Employee with at least one year of work experience at their current organization

4. Employee in frontline, independent contributor, junior or middle management role

Exclusion criteria:

1. Part-time or temporary employee

2. Employee in a senior management role

Response gathering form and procedure

We created an online form with instructions for respondents and 15 blank fields for them to enter descriptions of instances of OCB. The instructions gave a verbal brief (see Appendix) on OCB and its colloquial meaning, without using definitions or mentioning dimensions. The brief was followed by a request to share examples of behaviour that respondents had seen or performed at work and deemed as OCB. To help them come up with examples, we included a directive to think of every action that they or their colleagues take at work, test it against the criteria of whether it is beneficial to the organization and whether it is voluntary and describe actions that fulfil both. There were no other questions in the response form.

Data were collected in person or telephonically. On occasions of data collection in groups, participants filled their forms independently without discussion, to avoid excessively similar descriptions. They were assured of confidentiality and informed of the option to fill the form anonymously. After taking informed consent, participants received the form link and oral instructions similar to those in the form. Queries, if any, were resolved before they would begin answering. We collected a pool of 478 responses from 49 respondents. The pool was examined for relevance and comprehensibility, reducing it to 442 analysable descriptions of instances of OCB.

Thematic analysis

We followed Braun and Clarke's (2006) method of thematic analysis. Responses were read multiple times and manually coded with “Initial Codes (ICs)” by the first author. The coding scheme was not pre-decided to avoid imposing existing frameworks on the data. Some responses were marked with multiple ICs, since the behaviours mentioned in them were multi-fold. The coding was then thoroughly reviewed by the second author, with suggestions for change. Differences were resolved through discussions and coding was refined accordingly. Twenty-two ICs were arrived at (see Table 2) and categorized into themes in further processing.

We created five iterations of the thematic framework before finding the best fit with ten themes, in view of maximal coverage of each theme and minimal overlap between themes. This process was interpretive; the basis of grouping some behaviours was the desired outcome of those behaviours rather than their content. Finally, codes were re-examined for fitment under their respective themes, which resulted in the removal of one IC and addition of two more codes:

1. IC no 19 (using personal resources for the organization) overlapped with multiple themes and was removed. The responses under it were re-coded to the subtheme that the personal resources contributed to. For instance, sales managers using their personal network to raise the organization's sales were coded as 20 (over-delivering on performance expectations).

2. “Offering emotional support to colleagues” was added as a new code to represent the emotional component of personal relationships with colleagues, previously coded together under IC no 8 (Socializing with colleagues).

3. IC no 18 (Contributing to improving psychological environment of the organization) contained two distinct kinds of actions: one, speaking up and promoting open communication, and two, promoting team relationships and environment. It was accordingly split into two codes, “Voice and open communication” and “Maintaining team morale.”

The resulting ten themes were further categorized into super-themes based on their orientation: Interpersonal, individual, organizational and community. Each super-theme serves as a broad category of OCB, each theme as a component and subtheme as a subcomponent of OCB.

Findings: the final model

Each component is defined and elaborated below, grouped under the respective category, coupled with a representative verbatim quote from the dataset. Table 3 provides a succinct view of the model.

1. OCBs with interpersonal orientation

This category includes OCBs that directly improve interpersonal dynamics and working relationships in a team or organization. These are divided into four components.

• Helping

This OCB is defined as “Helping co-workers with work by going out of one's way.” It includes helping a peer, manager or subordinate with their work, sharing workload of colleagues on leave, knowledge sharing, training, and imparting organization-specific knowledge to new recruits.

My co-worker taught me new technologies which I was not familiar with. (Anon, Software Engineer, 5.8 years of work experience)

• Building social relationships

This OCB is defined as “Building personalized relationships with colleagues by treating them as friends and helping them outside of work.”

I offered sweets to my team on behalf of another team-mate as she was blessed with a baby. (MD, Technology Analyst, 6 years of work experience)

This theme includes instances of building personal relationships at work, such as visiting colleagues' places for festivals, sharing food and conversation, lending each other things to use, helping them with career growth, and having social gatherings outside of work.

• Emotionally mature behaviour

This OCB component is defined as “Efforts to maintain stable and positive emotional states in self and others at work.” It is about regulating one's own emotions for better performance, supporting and appreciating one's colleagues, tolerating inconveniences and adjusting one's ways for the team, and working to improve team morale.

Checking on each other's mental health during this lockdown. (TG, Cyber Security Manager, 11 years of work experience)

• Voice and open communication

Voice and open communication is defined as “Voicing out questions, concerns and feedback to authorities and maintaining an environment conducive to that.”

Speaking out loud to higher authorities is anything bad happens in (the) company or if there are any improvements or things needed. (AB, Senior Software Engineer, 5 years of work experience)

Voice has been extensively studied as an extra-role behaviour. Responses coded under this theme stressed less on actually speaking up and more on encouraging others to speak up. The discussion elaborates further.

1. OCBs with individual orientation

This category encompasses OCBs mainly concerned with individual performance and development of self. We separated these from OCBs with organizational orientation since these can directly influence the performance appraisal of the individual performing them, unlike the latter. This category is divided into two components.

• Personal industry

This OCB shares some etic elements like discipline with Western models. We defined Personal Industry as “Willingness and efforts to perform more and better than required.” This includes behaviours such as performing more quantity of work and different type of work in addition to one's job role, and achieving higher-than-expected excellence in the quality of work.

On a project recently, I was asked to spend no more than 15–20 mins in copy pasting. But I found formatting errors that required me to read through each sentence and spend at least 45 mins. I am now ensuring that formatting is done perfectly while also handling my other tasks. (KB, Senior Consulting Analyst, 6 years of work experience)

• Learning and knowledge creation

This component is defined as “Willingness and efforts to learn new skills, innovate and create knowledge in one's domain of work.” It encompasses acts of developing one's knowledge and skills for the benefit of the organization, and engaging in research and innovation.

Learning new technologies after working hours to keep my company in line with current market trends. (Anon, Software Engineer, 5.9 years of work experience)

Constant capacity building by employees gives organizations a competitive edge, especially in industries with rapid technological advances.

1. OCBs with organizational orientation

This category includes OCBs directed to benefit the organization as a whole, divided into three components.

• Housekeeping and event management

This OCB component is defined as “Planning and maintenance effort for physical and technical utilities, and events of the organization.”

Taking care of communal property … (RC, Content Strategist, 2.5 years of work experience)

This theme includes actions such as cleaning and decorating the workspace, replacing or enhancing common office utilities, administrative support for inter- or intra-organizational events and festivities etc.

• Organizational loyalty

Organizational loyalty, in this model, does not refer to prolonged retention of the employee with the organization. It is defined as “Representing the organization positively to outsiders.” It includes promoting the organization's reputation by publicizing it and referring people to join it.

Mentioning positive traits of work culture/ good initiatives by organization to friends and family. (Anon, Business Development Associate, 3 years of work experience)

• Process improvement

This OCB component involves improving organizational efficiency by setting up new processes and strategies, constantly looking out for best practices in order to adopt them, and making other improvement suggestions for how the organization gets work done. It is defined as “Seeking out and incorporating improvements in organizational processes and systems.”

Figuring/ trying out tools which have better user experience and passing them on to the team. (SA, Mobile & Desktop Manager, 9 years of work experience)

1. OCBs with community orientation

This category includes voluntary employee behaviours that serve a larger purpose than organizational benefit, grouped in one component.

• Higher order citizenship

The last OCB component is defined as “Participation in activities aimed at bettering conditions of the larger environment in which the organization is situated.” Since this goes beyond the organization and serves the environment or community at large, we named this dimension higher order citizenship. It includes environment-friendly acts, donating to social causes, standing up for less privileged co-workers and involvement in corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Donating to orphanages in the festive period on behalf of the company. (VA, Senior QA Engineer, 7 years of work experience)

Findings: frequencies of themes

Some OCBs had a stronger representation in the dataset than others. The frequency of appearance of each theme in the pool of 442 descriptions is presented in Table 4. Since some descriptions were coded with multiple ICs, the sum of frequencies of all themes is more than 100%. The responses were actions actually witnessed or performed; the theme frequencies can roughly indicate how frequently those behaviours are performed in organizations.

Discussion and conclusion

India is one of the most ancient civilizations in the world. It has witnessed several conquests, accommodating many clashes and confluences of ethnicities, lifestyles and values, emerging as a tremendously diverse, multilingual and multicultural country where contradictory philosophies coexist. It is difficult to represent the Indian population with 49 respondents, but our study serves as a starting point. Native and foreign scholars have reported a few pan-Indian cultural characteristics relevant to organizational behaviour, in light of which we discuss our findings. Indians are found to be highly hierarchy-oriented, with a strong power distance, respect for status, and a preference for paternalistic leadership styles and dependent subordinates. They switch between individualism and collectivism depending on the context but prefer highly emotional and personalized relationships. They are strongly embedded in and influenced by their in-groups, especially families. Suitably for diversity, India is also found to have the strongest context-dependent behavioural tendencies. Lastly, hypocrite and a cynical view of others have been reported as prominent Indian characteristics as well (Hofstede, 1980; Trompenaars, 1993; Tripathi, 1990; Sinha et al., 2004; Gupta and Panda, 2009).

Our model shares some OCB components with existing models, specifically, helping, personal industry, voice, organizational loyalty and process improvement. We discuss new OCBs from our model that existing models do not enlist, OCBs absent from our model that are listed in existing models and some additional observations below. Inclusion of an OCB may be interpreted either as employees' belief that the behaviour deserves recognition as an extra effort, pointing to a possible lack of recognition currently, or as employees' realization that some of their ordinary behaviours performed without expectation of recognition benefit the organization.

New OCBs in the model

Building social relationships at work is a different OCB from social participation, which is limited to social activities during the workday. This OCB builds close relationships with colleagues that spill over into personal lives. India is known for giving importance to personal emotional connections in business relationships, so much so that even promotion and hiring decisions may be determined by them (Trompenaars, 1993; Hofstede, 2011, 2021). Such personalized relationships may be necessary for organizational effectiveness in India, for the cohesiveness that they create in the workforce. But they are also heavily influenced by identities and discrimination based on in-group memberships, which can hinder egalitarian practices. This finding suggests that researchers and practitioners should acknowledge relationship-building as an OCB, investigate its variations in different contexts and put constitutional mandates in place to prevent personalized relationships from excluding marginalized members.

Emotionally mature behaviour is a new addition. Although a few of its subthemes resemble the employee sustainability domain in a previous model (Dekas et al., 2013), this component is a unique class of behaviours that are all manifestations of emotional intelligence within a work environment. OCB has a well-documented relationship with emotional intelligence across cultures (Anwar et al., 2017; Miao et al., 2020). But considering emotion management an OCB in itself may indicate that the behaviour has gone unappreciated for long and warrants more attention. Particularly, fostering positive moods in self during stressful and negative experiences in order to perform at work is akin to emotional labour, except that it is not a job requirement, but a voluntary act. Employees in the technology industry, who form a major part of our sample, are exposed to neo-colonial practices by global multinational companies (Ravishankar et al., 2010; Mathai, 2022). They experience dissonance between the highly affective culture in India that encourages emotional expression at work, and the hegemony of industrialized cultures that encourage neutrality and separation of emotions from work (Trompenaars, 1993). This may lead those employees to perceive emotional regulation as an additional effort. Another contributing factor may be the increased stress and need for emotional regulation that the new generation of workers face, which contradicts with their beliefs in being open about emotions (Moore, 2017; Moukheiber, 2019; ADP, 2020; Narayan et al., 2021).

Learning and knowledge creation is another new OCB in the model that is a key characteristic of knowledge workers (Swart, 2007), especially IT workers who have to keep abreast with constant technological developments. Learning may be seen as a duty of workers or a sign of their cognitive abilities. However, inclusion of learning as an OCB highlights the additional effort that it is and needs to be considered so in further research.

Housekeeping and event management is an OCB that the OCB-KW study termed administrative behaviour and excluded from the final model due to low representation (Dekas et al., 2013). Our dataset has the highest proportion of this OCB, most of them involving cleaning and decorating the workspace and arranging gatherings. Housekeeping is a service act that has overwhelming evidence of being asked more often of women and minority employees and being given less recognition or reciprocity than other more “glamorous” OCBs (Kark and Waismel-Manor, 2005; O'Meara et al., 2017; Miller and Roksa, 2019; Thompson and Bergeron, 2017). Many housekeeping duties involve labour that is associated with the lower rungs of the discriminatory caste hierarchy in India. The country also has a general trend of devaluing labour (Sinha, 1994). The historically feudal culture has had a clear owner-labourer divide in enterprises, whereby people believe that those low in status are naturally supposed to perform labour for those higher up (Gupta and Panda, 2009). Our respondents were mostly urban and privileged, a majority of them males. Thus, an explanation for this finding could be that these respondents may not housekeep as often as their less privileged counterparts; and when they do, they assert it as an extra effort deserving recognition. On the other hand, all of the respondents held junior positions in the organizational hierarchy, and the high frequency of the theme may simply reflect that juniors housekeep much more often than seniors. Further research can unpack these complexities with a more representative sample.

Higher order citizenship is a hitherto unaccounted behaviour in OCB that shows a fairly high frequency in our study. Employee participation in social initiatives may be seen as a distraction or excessive workload that can impede their core performance and organizational productivity. However, this OCB by employees can strengthen the corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts of organizations, maintaining their relationship with the community and leading to several long-term benefits for the business (Carroll and Shabana, 2010; Turker, 2009; Jain and Rizvi, 2020). India expects moral authority from business leaders, expects businesses to fulfil their larger societal responsibilities and has a long tradition of corporate philanthropy since before CSR was a concept (Gupta, 1996). Evidently, social responsibility is an important and frequent OCB for India.

OCB absent from the model

No response in our dataset described participation in organizational governance or civic virtue. The absence can be explained by the little exposure to governance or policy-making that junior and mid-level employees get. In the Indian private sector, governance decisions are taken by senior management. Concrete mechanisms to involve employees in these matters do not exist or operate only superficially. Given the opportunity to participate, how Indian employees will perceive civic virtue can only be known with more research.

Other remarkable findings

Voice and open communication had the lowest frequency in our dataset at less than a percent. Although a low incidence of challenging OCBs is expected in a high-power distance culture, voice is preached by corporates as a necessary behaviour for organizational progress. Indians are found to prefer paternalistic leaders that subordinates obey and depend on for decisions (Sinha, 1999; Guptan, 1988). But incumbent managers have to appear encouraging of Voice from juniors in order to align with the global values of their organization or industry. This creates a contradictory situation for employees, not unfamiliar to the Indian mindset, which is “a product of the interplay of dual value sets” (Gupta and Panda, 2009, p. 265). Indians respond to it with context-dependent and, at times, “face keeping” hypocritical behaviour (Gupta and Panda, 2009, p. 265; Sinha et al., 2004). Fittingly, we observed that only one of the responses coded under this theme mentioned actually speaking up to authorities about concerns, while the remaining described encouraging others to question and speak up. It may be that employees in India who can construe voice as a beneficial behaviour would still prefer to not upset the status quo but support voice indirectly from a safe distance to appear “global.”

Personal industry was the fourth highest appearing OCB in the dataset. The nature of work has greatly changed through third and fourth industrial revolutions. In the new knowledge economy, jobs have become more intellectual and creative than physical (World Bank Group, 2019). This has made measurement of performance quality and quantity more complicated and blurred the boundary between expected and actual performance. Since an expected level of performance may not be easily captured in the employment contract or job description, there may be a gap between employers' and employees' perceptions of the same. Our findings suggest that employees perceive high quality performance as an OCB. Employers and managers may want to give it its due.

Conclusion

A preliminary, contextualized model of OCB has been developed, with five OCBs newly introduced and one OCB absent. The four super-themes of interpersonal, individual, organizational and community orientation allow for broad-level analysis, a unique contribution of the model. Overall, the study fulfils the aim of exploring OCB components in the context of contemporary workplaces, Indian culture and employee perspective. Employees in India consider building relationships at work, emotional maturity, learning and knowledge creation, housekeeping and community work as strong OCB components but have not included organizational governance participation in the list. The model may alter if an opportunity for such participation exists. The high incidence of personal industry and the unusual definition of voice are noticeable results of the changing job world and the confluence of Western and local management thought respectively, both of which are impacts of globalization, technological advances and more exposure to happenings in the rest of the world.

Implications for research and practice

Indian employees may be defining and displaying OCB differently; recognizing them in research and practice is the next step. Further research could refine and test the applicability of this model, build measures based on the model and undertake conceptual work in specific industries or sectors and with perspectives of diverse employee populations. Researchers could also study each newly added OCB in this model further, investigate employee views using various methodologies and seek motivational mechanisms for each.

In practice, organizations and managers working with Indian employees can look into acknowledging their emotional maturity and personal industry at work more. More involvement in governing the organization and learning can be supported and facilitated by employers. They would also benefit from understanding and encouraging personalized co-worker relationships in India. Lastly, organizations will have to understand the complex reality of voice for Indian employees and take subtle, persistent and multi-fold transformational initiatives if employees are to be encouraged to speak up.

Limitations and further exploration

While this study revealed much about Indian employees' perspective of OCB, the data collection method restricted follow-up questions on the responses, giving us little information about the rationale and motives behind described OCBs. More research could expand the model by including motives, consequences, organizational antecedents, and so on.

The data were coded and categorized by a single researcher and reviewed by the second author and an outside expert. Involvement of multiple coders would make the study design more rigorous.

A majority of participants were urban, privileged employees engaged in knowledge work, which limits the generalizability of the model. More data from different social strata and lines of work can enrich the model further.

Table 1

Demographic and job characteristics of the sample

Gender	No of respondents	% of respondents out of 49	Industry	No of respondents	% of respondents out of 49
Male	29	59.18	Information Technology	45	91.84
Female	13	26.53	Consulting	2	4.08
Unidentified	7	14.29	Oil and Gas	2	4.08

Work experience (Years)	No of respondents	% of respondents out of 49	Function	No of respondents	% of respondents out of 49
1 to 5	24	48.98	Core Product or Technology	31	63.27
6 to 10	18	36.73	Quality Analysis	5	10.20
11 to 15	5	10.20	Management	4	8.16
16 to 20	2	4.08	Support (Sales, Marketing, HR, Content)	9	18.37

Source(s): Authors' work

Table 2

Twenty-two initial codes created to code examples of OCB provided by respondents

1. Overtime/extra work/work outside of their functional area	12. Discipline (punctuality, not taking personal calls in work hours etc.)
2. Contributing to knowledge creation for their own field of work	13. Informal events- organizing and participating in the organization and on behalf of the organization
3. Helping recruit people to the company	14. Tolerating inconveniences/adjusting with colleagues/teamwork
4. Helping colleagues with work (including training, mentoring, on-boarding new employees)	15. Personal growth and knowledge development/learning new skills for company
5. Helping colleagues outside of work (their personal growth or things not related to work/career, courtesy)	16. Contributing to publicity of company (mouth publicity, saying good things about company or marketing help)
6. Participation in social work activities on behalf of the organization (CSR, eco-friendly practices, charity, advocacy and diversity)	17. Contributing to improving efficiency by setting up new processes, strategies, looking out for and adopting best practices etc.
7. Appreciation/recognition for others' work	18. Contributing to improving psychological environment of the organization
8. Socializing with colleagues and maintaining personal relationships/bond (including courtesy things like lending something if they need it)	19. Using personal resources for the organization (financial, networking etc.)
9. Maintaining infrastructure of office/organization (physical, technical utilities)	20. Over-delivering on performance expectations
10. Saving organizational resources (electricity, finances)	21. Maintaining emotional stability for the sake of work
11. Maintaining physical workspace and environment (cleanliness, silence, security, decorations etc.)	22. Client service orientation

Source(s): Authors' work

Table 3

Final model of OCB with four broad categories, ten components and 23 subcomponents

Super-themes	Themes	Subthemes
Interpersonal orientation	Helping	Helping colleagues with work
	Building social relationships	Helping colleagues outside of work
		Socializing with colleagues and maintaining personal relationships
	Emotionally mature behaviour	Appreciating and recognizing others' work
		Offering emotional support to colleagues
		Tolerating inconveniences and adjusting with colleagues
		Maintaining one's emotional stability for work
		Maintaining team morale
	Voice and open communication	Encouraging open communication and offering feedback for improvement
Individual orientation	Personal industry	Extra work/work outside of their functional area
		Discipline
		Exceeding performance expectations
		Client service orientation
	Learning and knowledge creation	Contributing to knowledge creation for the field of work
		Learning new skills and developing one's knowledge
Organizational orientation	Housekeeping and event management	Maintaining infrastructure of the organization
		Maintaining the physical environment of the organization
		Organizing and participating in informal intra- and inter-organization events
	Organizational loyalty	Helping the organization with recruitment
		Publicizing the organization
	Process improvement	Improving work processes
Community orientation	Higher order citizenship	Civic activities on behalf of the organization
		Saving organizational resources

Source(s): Authors' work

Table 4

Percentage of times each OCB theme/component appears in the dataset of 442 responses

Theme/Component of OCB	% frequency of appearance in dataset
Helping	18.55
Building social relationships	27.83
Emotionally mature behaviour	6.56
Voice and open communication	0.90
Personal industry	14.93
Learning and knowledge creation	5.43
Housekeeping and event management	28.73
Organizational loyalty	6.79
Process improvement	4.98
Higher order citizenship	9.95

Note(s): Values in italics indicate the four highest frequencies and the lowest frequency in the dataset

Source(s): Authors' work

Appendix Brief for respondents on organizational citizenship behaviour

When you work at an organization, you are bound by an employment contract and the tasks and duties mentioned in the contract. However, you develop a social relationship and a belonging with your co-workers as well as with the organization as a whole, which extends beyond the contract.

Such voluntary actions or attitudes of an employee that go beyond the scope of the contract/technical job duties, and are positive for the organization/the co-workers in some way are called Organizational Citizenship Behaviour.

Please write down instances of such behaviour that you have performed or witnessed in your work life. Please feel free to contact the researcher in case of any query.

If you are stuck, try to remember every small thing that you or your colleagues do during work hours (and work-related things that you do after work hours), and apply the following test.

1. Is it a positive behaviour/attitude for your co-workers/for the organization?

2. Is it voluntary? (Not part of an employment contract and the employee cannot be mandated to do it)

If both answers are yes, please write down the instance.

Source(s): Authors' work