The Impact Of Organizational Citizenship Behavior On Team Effectiveness

Despite the widespread interest in the topic of organizational citizenship behaviors (Abbr. OCB), little empirical research has tested the fundamental assumption that these forms of behavior improve the effectiveness of work teams or organizations. Based on literature review, this study empirically investigated the relationship among OCB and team effectiveness. We explored mainly the impact of OCB on team effectiveness at the team level. We classified OCB into three domains based on the research of Farh's: self, group, organization, and self domains included two dimensions: self development and work initiative. While we defined team effectiveness as a two-dimension structure: team performance and personnel satisfaction.As for the samples, this study selected the software Research & Development (Abbr. R&D) teams, because capability of research and development is a very important factor to a company's success, even a country. Considering the character of software R&D team, we chose'task difficulty'as the interference variable between OCB and team effectiveness. Then, questionnaire surveys were administered to about 19 organizations in China and the number of samples was 178.The paper reached the following main conclusions:(1) Members in software R&D team are mostly young and own high education record; (2) OCB can be classified into three dimensions: self, group, organization; and self dimensions include self development and work initiative; (3) The team effectiveness can be measured in two dimension of team performance and personnel satisfaction; (4) Company size significantly effect the satisfaction of team members; but for team performance and OCB in three dimensions, it is totally different; (5) Team size only significantly effect with the work initiative of self dimensions of OCB, and has no significant effect on other OCB and team effectiveness in two dimensions; (6) The attribute of company has no significantly effect on group dimension and self development of self dimension of OCB, which is same in personnel satisfaction dimension of team effectiveness; but it is opposite in other OCB and team effectiveness; (7) Task difficulty has no significantly effect on company attribute, company size, team size and gender; (8) Gender has no significantly effect on OCB and Team effectiveness; (9) Work initiative of self dimension, group dimension and organizational dimension of OCB positively correlate with team performance, and only the second one positively correlate with personnel satisfaction. But as a whole, OCB positively correlate with Team effectiveness; (10) Task difficulty positively correlates with OCB in total, the group dimension, self development of self dimension of OCB, and same with team effectiveness in two dimensions; (11) Work initiative of self dimension and group dimension of OCB can improve team performance more with high task difficulty than they do with low task difficulty. But the effect of organization dimension of OCB improving the team performance is not related to the task difficulty.From these findings of the empirical research, suggestions of improving team effectiveness and future directions are discussed.