Helping Out or Acting Out? A Moderated Mediation Model of Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Abstract

There has been much research dedicated to exploring gender differences in organizational citizenship behavior (i.e., non-required helping behaviors at work, OCB; Organ, 1988), as social role theory (Eagly, 1987) suggests that the gendered roles individuals are socialized to fulfill (e.g., women as caretakers, men as breadwinners; Parson & Bales, 1955) will likely yield gender differences in helping behaviors. OCB are commonly divided into two categories: OCB directed at the individual (OCB-I), and OCB directed at the organization (OCB-O; Williams & Anderson, 1991). A more recent meta-analysis, however, did not find a significant gender gap in OCB (Ng et al., 2016). To explore the contested relationship between gender and OCB, the present study examined emotional intelligence (i.e., the ability to monitor others’ feelings and act accordingly; EI; Salovey & Mayer, 1990), agency (i.e., self-orientation), and communion (i.e., others-orientation; Bakan 1966; Helgeson, 1994) as mediators. This model was expanded to include perceived organizational support (POS) as a second-stage moderator as organizational support theory (Eisenberger et al., 1986) suggests that the more an employee feels supported by their organization, the more they will contribute in the workplace. Results showed that the moderated mediation effect of gender on OCB-O via agency, with POS moderating the path between agency and OCB-O, was statistically significant. In other words, the positive mediation effect of agency between gender and OCB-O, which helped men more in the current study, was strengthened when a participant felt their organization was more supportive.