Individual- and organizational-level consequences of organizational citizenship behaviors: A meta-analysis.

Although one of the main reasons for the interest in organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) is the potential consequences of these behaviors, no study has been reported that summarizes the research regarding the relationships between OCBs and their outcomes. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide a meta-analytic examination of the relationships between OCBs and a variety of individual-and organizational-level outcomes. Results, based on 168 independent samples (N ϭ 51,235 individuals), indicated that OCBs are related to a number of individual-level outcomes, including managerial ratings of employee performance, reward allocation decisions, and a variety of withdrawal-related criteria (e.g., employee turnover intentions, actual turnover, and absenteeism). In addition, OCBs were found to be related (k ϭ 38; N ϭ 3,611 units) to a number of organizational-level outcomes (e.g., productivity, efficiency, reduced costs, customer satisfaction, and unit-level turnover). Of interest, somewhat stronger relationships were observed between OCBs and unit-level performance measures in longitudinal studies than in cross-sectional studies, providing some evidence that OCBs are causally related to these criteria. The implications of these findings for both researchers and practitioners are discussed. Keywords: organizational citizenship behaviors, contextual performance, meta-analysis, customer satisfaction, withdrawal If the number of articles that have been published over the past quarter century is any indication, it would appear that organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) are firmly embedded in the fabric of the fields of organizational behavior and industrialorganizational psychology. For example, since Organ and his colleagues (Bateman & Organ, 1983; Organ (1988) originally defined organizational citizenship behavior as "individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization" (p. 4). However, more recently, he modified this definition to say that OCB is "performance that supports the social and psychological environment in which task performance takes place" (Organ, 1997, p. 95). The advantage of this revised definition is that it (a) maintains the distinction that has empirically been shown to exist between task performance and OCBs (MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Fetter, 1991; Of course, if one assumes that OCBs have an effect on organizational performance, it makes sense to identify those variables that increase these behaviors in organizational settings. That is probably why most of the research in this domain has focused on the potential antecedents of OCBs, such as personality traits (cf. There are several good reasons for the growing interest in the effects that OCBs have on these types of outcomes. First, if OCBs do have positive relationships with organizational effectiveness criteria, then it is important for us to quantify these effects so that we have a more complete picture of the potential impact that OCBs have on the "bottom line" of the organization. Second, it is important to examine the relationships between OCBs and organizational effectiveness criteria because, despite the fact that OCBs are assumed to be positively related to unit or organizational effectiveness, there is some evidence that this assumption is not always true. For example, in their study of 116 insurance agencies, Therefore, the purpose of this article is to provide a quantitative summary of the empirical relationships between OCBs and individual and organizational outcomes. As a first step in this process, we review several theoretical explanations for why we expect OCBs to influence both individual and organizational outcomes. Following this, we conduct a meta-analytic review of the studies examining these relationships. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results and identify several avenues for future research. This study makes several contributions to the literature. First, although there have been a substantial number of meta-analyses that have reported the relationships between OCBs and some of their antecedents (Borman et al., 2001; Background and Hypothese