Exploring The Trajectories Of Organizational Citizenship Behavior And Boundary Conditions Through Organizational Socialization Perspective

With the intensification of competition environment,innovation becomes a directive impetus for enterprieses development.In order to build capacity of innovation-driven growth,enterprises need to organize and arouse the enthusiasm of employees rather than relying solely on their managers.Thus employees'organizational citizenship behavior which direct toward changing the status quo or improving exist environment aroused the attention of scholars.Although research on organizational citizenship behavior has got rich research achievement,most researches mainly concentrated on antecedents and outcomes of OCB on a static level.Static models of OCB may explain the reason that makes some employees more proactive than others at a single point in time,but it's hard to explain why OCB may change as time goes on by using those models.In fact,some of the OCB literatures suggest that OCB should be dynamic and progressive,yet handful research is conducted on the dynamic model of OCB.In the limited dynamic research on OCB,scholars always adopt two different research methods.One is cross-lagged research design.In these cases,researches always explore the one direction influence between OCB and other variables.Although it was found in these studies that OCB in T2 can change with the change of independent variables in T1,they are still limited in explaining why OCB may change on its' own over time.Another research stream is repeated measurement design,researches usually use experience sampling method to explore the effects of transitory mood,affect,justice and exhaustion that cause individuals to alter the frequency of their OCB over the short period of time.These researches showed that OCB is dynamics within-individual level in minutes,days and weeks.However,despite the great advances of experience-sampling method used in OCB literature,they are largely measuring OCB in a moment and predicting the within-individual variation of OCB in a short period of time.In contrast,using a relatively long time framework to study the dynamic of OCB may be critical for understanding the stable trend of OCB because studies on OCB in relatively long periods of time will show less fluctuation and can model the trend of OCB itself better compared with shorter-term studies.Actually,employees who have gain sufficient work experiences tend to develop relatively stable and satisfactory patterns to accommodate with their jobs and organization from a long term perspective.In other words,most employees in organization have an equilibrium level of their behaviors so that it could be reasonable to do the static or momentary studies without considering its trajectories.Actually,this assumption is only applied to those who have sufficient work experience while those who just entering a new organization may show fluctuation of their behaviors because they have to experience shocks that constantly affect their equilibrium.Thus,we mainly focus on newcomers' OCB trajectories from organizational socialization perspective in this dissertation.Additionally,OCB is a multi-dimensional construct and it can be measured in multi-sources as well as influenced by multi-factors.Thus,this dissertation intends to solve the following four questions:?what are the trajectories of OCB among different groups?Will the trajectories be significant different between each other??Are there any significant difference in trajectories between OCB dimensions??Will the trajectories be different between different OCB sources??What factors can influence of OCB trajectories?And how the interaction effects of each factor can influence on OCB trajectories?In order to answer above questions,we designed three sub-studies.Study 1:The dynamic model of OCB trajectories.Based on organizational socializational theory and conservation of resource theory,we explored and compared OCB trajectories in different groups,dimensions and sources.We found that newcomers' and job changers' helping behavior and voice behavior both exhibit invert-U shaped.While for organizational insiders,their helping behavior and voice behavior is relatively stable and exhibit a slightly negative linear trend.When conduct the comparative study of different groups,dimensions and sources,we found that there is no significant difference in the variation of OCB trajectories between newcomers and job changers.Meanwhile organizational socialization process will have a significantly greater impact on helping behavior than it will on the traj ectory of voice behavior and empoyees' will show more helping behavior than voice behavior.Additionaly,we found that there is no significant difference for the variation of OCB trajectories in different sources,but considering the magnitude,supervisor will report higher level of OCB than self-report.Study 2:The moderating roles of multiple factors on OCB trajectories.In this study,we introduced some stable and changeless variables to explore how these factors can moderate the relationship between time and organizational citizenship behavior.We found that for proactive personality,it can positive affect employees'helping behavior and voice behavior and it can moderate the relationship between time and helping behavior and voice behavior such that the relationship will be stronger for employees under lower proactive personality.For task interdependence,it has positive effect on employees'helping behavior and it can moderate the relationship between time and helping behavior such that the relationship will be stronger for employees under low task interdependence.However,task interdependence can not moderate the relationship between time and voice behavior.For relational self-construal,it has positive effect on employees' helping behavior and it can moderate the relationship between time and helping behavior such that the relationship will be stronger for employees with lower relational self-construal.Moreover,relationsl self-construal has a negative effect on employees' voice behavior and it can moderate the relationship between time and voice behavior such that the relationship will be stronger for emloyees with higher relational self-construal.For transformational leadership,it has positive effect on employees' helping behavior and newcomers' voice behavior and it can partial moderate the relationship between time and helping behavior and voice behavior such that the relationship will be stronger for employees under low transformational leadership.Study 3:Theinteractive moderating effect model of OCB trajectories.Based on trait activiation theory and person-environment fit theory,we explored the interactive effect between individual factors and environment factors on OCB trajectories.We found that the interaction between proactive personality and task interdependence can not moderate the relationship between time and helping behavior and voice behavior.While the interaction between proactive personality and transformational leadership can moderate the relationship between time and helping behavior and voice behavior such that the relationship will be stronger under lower proactive personality and lower transformational leadership.We also found that the interaction between relational self-construal and task interdependence can not moderate the relationship between time and helping behavior or voice behavior.While the interaction between relational self-construal and transformational leadership can moderate the relationship between time and voice behavior but not helping behavior such that the relationship will be stronger under higher relational self-construal and lower transformational leadership.Our results have important implications for organizations.First,when interpreting and designing incentives to maximize employees OCB,managers should consider organizational socialization process.Because OCB should be relatively stable for those experiencing little change,insiders may not benefit much from it.In contrast,newcomers and job changers make better candidates for OCB incentive.Second,organizations may help newcomers through organizational socialization process by teaching them what changes will be expected during the first year when they enter the organization.To do this,newcomers who experience the increase in OCB may be have more committed to their organization so that they can sustain their OCB in a relatively high level.Third,in most organizations they always let supervisors to assess employees' behavior because they think supervisor can fully understand the work behaviors enacted by employees.Our results show that this hypothesis may only applied for those supervisors who have sufficient interaction with their employees,while for newcomers and job changers its more appropriate letting themselves to evaluate their own performance before their supervisor familiar with them.Fourth,organizations may consider proactive personality as a part of broader criteria for selecting or promoting employees.In addition to selecting procedure,organizations can also provide appropriate environment for newcomers,such as arranging newcomers into high task interdependence situations to promote their OCB.Finally,we note that our study has certain limitations that provide opportunities for future research.