Personality and Contextual Antecedents of Organizational Citizenship Behavior: a Study of Two Occupational Groups

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of personality trait of dispositional affect and contextual variables of multiple commitments on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) in two occupational groups. Three dimensions of OCBs were considered: helping civic virtue and sportsmanship behaviors. We used positive and negative affectivity scale to measure dispositional affect. For commitments we examined affective and normative organizational and occupational commitments. The data were collected from 180 engineers and 180 teachers. The findings show that affect multiple commitments and occupation all have significant impacts on different dimensions of OCBs. Dispositional affect had the most influence on all three dimensions of OCBs. In addition helping behavior is affected by normative organizational commitment while civic virtue behavior is influenced by affective commitments (both organizational and occupational) and occupation. Sportsmanship behavior is explained by occupation and affective organizational commitment. Occupation has been shown to make a unique contribution to understanding OCBs. The present study showed that the teachers for example exhibited more civic virtue and sportsmanship behaviors than the engineers. Implications of the findings for future research and practice are discussed.