A management doctoral student was completing a general study of “organizational citizenship behaviors” for her dissertation. Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) are workplace behaviors that promote effective organizational functioning but are discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system [8]. Helping a coworker is one example of citizenship behavior. In the course of examining data from her sample of employees at five firms in five different industries, she elected to look at OCB by job classification. What she found was at first startling, then intriguing. The levels of OCB associated with workers in the computer information systems and IT job classification were significantly lower than the levels of OCB reported for workers in other areas of these companies, such as operations and accounting/finance. Simply put, IT workers tended to perform significantly fewer citizenship behaviors (such as helping someone prevent a problem or constructively participating in political processes at work) than colleagues in non-IT areas of the companies.
What does this mean? Is the IT area within a firm less likely to be populated with good organizational citizens? Are IT workers selfish? Are they inherently less helpful? Are they stretched too thin? The management researcher decided to team up with an IT colleague to explore this a bit further…
Citizenship Behaviors—What We Know
The place to start is with what management researchers already know about OCB. Five types of OCB have been identified:
- Altruism, defined as voluntary actions that help another with a work problem;
- Courtesy, which refers to behaviors that help someone prevent a problem;
- Sportsmanship, which involves tolerating the negatives in a situation without complaining;
- Civic virtue, which reflects a constructive involvement in political processes at work; and
- Conscientiousness, which entails going well beyond the norm in completing job tasks [9].
Although to date no research has been reported examining differences in OCB across occupational groups, much work has been done to determine factors that lead individuals to perform citizenship behaviors.
To predict behavior, researchers generally consider individual factors such as personality traits and situational factors. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, researchers looked for individual factors (such as extraversion and neuroticism) that would predict citizenship behaviors. Results of this stream of research were largely fruitless and led management researchers to conclude that individual factors such as personality generally do not predict OCB [10]. Simply stated, it is not likely that an individual is merely predisposed to exhibit citizenship behavior across situations.
In contrast to research trying to link individual differences to OCB, investigations of a situational factor—fairness perception—as a predictor of OCB have been more fruitful. The concept of “exchange” has become a useful framework for understanding the connection between fairness perceptions and OCB. There are two types of exchange: economic exchange, which is precise, explicit, and contractual; and social exchange, which has a diffuse, unspecified nature. While economic exchange is based on a more narrowly defined sort of fairness, social exchange is open-ended. As a result, economic exchange leads to following the letter of the job description, while social exchange opens the door for the extension of positive behaviors not explicitly recognized or rewarded—also known as OCB.
Bottom line: People who perceive their organization treats them fairly are more likely to develop a social exchange relationship and engage in OCB than those who do not. This is known in the management literature as organizational justice, which is based on fairness perceptions or equity. There are three types of organizational justice: distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. Distributive justice is concerned with whether people perceive distributions of rewards and resources as fair and their reactions to unfair allocations. Procedural justice reflects the perceived fairness of policies and procedures used to determine the allocations. Even when established policies are deemed fair, however, there may be variance in how those policies and procedures are enacted. For that reason, interactional justice captures the perceived fairness of how company policies are applied and carried out, including the dignity and respect with which they are communicated.
Relationships found between distributive justice and OCB have been limited and sporadic, but results have been more consistent concerning procedural justice, to the point the relationship between procedural justice and OCB is generally accepted by management researchers [7]. Interactional justice is the newest of the three justice dimensions and little research has been reported in regard to its relationship to OCB. So although interactional justice is theoretically expected to contribute to OCB, this stream of research is considered to still be in progress.
An additional situational factor—trust in supervisor—has been identified by researchers as a predictor of citizenship behavior. Supervisory trust is theorized to be the glue that holds the social exchange relationship between employee and organization together [11]. If the worker loses trust in the supervisor, he or she recasts the relationship in terms of a more rigidly defined economic exchange. Once this happens, the employee offers services based on quid pro quo and is less likely to exhibit OCB.
To summarize, research to date suggests a fine line is often all that separates a social exchange relationship, which facilitates OCB, and an economic exchange relationship, which does not. Also, which exchange is in evidence depends on fairness perceptions and trust in the supervisor. So, the next step is to consider these two precursors to OCB within the IT work context.
Fairness and Trust in IT
Given the intriguing notion that OCB levels may be lower in IT workers, we must suspect that fairness perceptions and supervisory trust—the precursors to OCB—are also likely to be lower. Sure enough, in examining the dissertation sample, both supervisory trust and fairness perceptions were significantly lower in the IT occupational group than in the operations and accounting/finance groups. Of the three kinds of organizational justice, it turned out to be perceptions of interactional justice that most differed between IT and the other job groups. Regression tests indicated that courtesy behavior of the IT workers, such as helping someone prevent a problem, was significantly affected by supervisory trust and indirectly influenced by interactional justice (which was mediated by supervisory trust).
In sum, the IT workers in this sample had significantly lower perceptions than non-IT counterparts of management trust, and of how fairly and respectfully policies and procedures were enacted. These lower perceptions contributed to lower levels of citizenship behaviors. Going to the root of the problem, why would IT professionals report lower perceived fairness and less supervisory trust?
IT jobs tend to be rather autonomous, and at the same time include elements of ambiguity and conflict that stem from interdependence and boundary spanning. Such jobs are characteristic of what management researchers describe as “new work systems”—work situations with reduced supervision and greater autonomy, where employee behavior is not easily observed and reinforced [2]. When employee-supervisor relationships are not tightly coupled and are low in interaction and communication, it may be difficult to build supervisory trust. Fairness perceptions may suffer as well because without communication, the supervisor and employee risk losing touch with each other’s perspective. Without steady interaction, the IT worker can lose an understanding of why activities are being undertaken and the manager can lose sight of issues involved in completing the activities.
The notion of a disconnect between technical staff and management is not new. It is clearly embodied in present-day workplace humor as a primary theme in the popular Dilbert comic strip with its inept pointy haired boss, and anecdotal reports of problems related to supervisory trust and perceived fairness abound. For example, a network administrator described an interaction that would eat away at one’s confidence in management: “I’ve tried to get my boss to change deadlines…(but) it doesn’t work. I go in to talk and end up getting two or three more jobs, without ever resolving the original issue” [4].
Unfortunately, such problems are not only evidenced in social humor and anecdotes. For example, indications of perceived unfairness and a lack of supervisory trust (although not directly investigated) emerged in a study of burnout among IT personnel. Exhausted IT professionals identified insufficient staff and resources as the primary cause of their burnout and described work environments in which “management places unrealistic and arbitrary goals on us, then refuses to hire anyone to help” [5, 6]. Feelings of unfairness and distrust appear to be surfacing, which would cause a social exchange relationship to fall away and be replaced by more of an economic exchange mindset, thereby reducing the likelihood of OCB.
Let’s think about this at an operational level. The management literature and our data suggest that when IT professionals do not trust management and believe that managers act unfairly, they shift from feelings of social exchange to economic exchange, and citizenship behaviors like courtesy (helping someone to prevent a problem) are less likely. This conjures up an image of an IT professional who, feeling things are being managed unfairly, shrugs and turns away from something on the periphery that looks to be a potential problem. The employee may figure “this place isn’t treating me fairly, why should I go out of my way to help them prevent that problem?”
Practical Implications
For an organization, it all comes down to a basic question. Even if IT professionals do have lower OCB levels than other firm workers, does it matter? Do companies need citizenship behaviors from their IT professionals? You bet they do. That OCB is important for organizational success is becoming ever clearer, especially as the definition of an individual’s job becomes ever less clear. OCB is important in work environments that “give rise to mutual dependence among members and require spontaneous give-and-take… (and) accommodating gestures among the parties in order to achieve effective coordination of their respective efforts” [8].
As IT (and other) jobs become more dynamic, requiring individuals to span organizational boundaries, work their way through ambiguities, be resourceful and assimilate and learn as they go, an environment that encourages OCB becomes crucial to successful organizational functioning. For example, organizations need IT professionals to voluntarily and automatically take actions that help to prevent problems, and companies need IT professionals to constructively participate in political processes, particularly in situations that require the IT worker’s perspective to effectively enact a process or perhaps even to identify or correct a flawed process.
Given that the IT workers in this sample were reported to exhibit lower OCB levels than non-IT counterparts, and given that the IT workers themselves reported significantly lower levels of supervisory trust and interactional fairness, we must ask: Are IT managers inadvertently discouraging IT professionals from exhibiting citizenship behaviors that the organization desperately needs?
The following scenario, drawn from a study of software engineers at a Fortune 500 company, presents an extreme example of management behavior discouraging OCB:
“… some engineers were more helpful to their peers. For example, there was only one member of the software group who had previous experience working with the new type of technology the group had to use. This engineer was extremely helpful. Yet instead of recognizing his contribution to the group, his managers viewed his tendency to help others as a hindrance to his own work. At one point, this engineer approached the software manager and told him that he was having trouble balancing all the demands for his help and completing his own deliverables. According to the engineer, he was told, `Do your own work first, and then, if you want to help others, that is your choice, but do it on your own time'” [12].
An important part of a manager’s job is to be aware of citizenship behaviors and to promote them where needed. To encourage OCB in IT staffs, managers must consistently work with IT employees in ways that build trust and confidence in management and engender perceptions of fairness, because these are fundamental precursors to OCB. Clear and timely communication is essential to building trust, and listening is a vital step toward ensuring that practices and decisions are perceived as fair.
Note that the construct here is perceived fairness; the only way managers can know if there is a problem is to engage the IT staff to learn their perceptions and to understand their perspective. By listening, the manager can know when a decision or action is perceived as unfair. Here, he or she has the opportunity to reverse that perception, either by better communicating what is being done and why, or by adjusting the decision or action to be more fair. In contrast to the managerial behavior exhibited in the previous scenario, managers must expend the time and communication effort necessary to understand the work situations confronting their IT staff, and lead the way in finding constructive solutions that benefit both the employee and the organization.
Looking Ahead
No other research examining differences in OCB across occupational groups has been reported, and the results from the present study dictate that this be explored. Perhaps the finding from this sample was an anomaly, or perhaps it was not. Research is needed to deliberately examine OCB in IT, and if lower OCB is confirmed as a common occurrence, investigate whether it is tied to certain types of IT jobs. Researchers should also examine the IT worker’s commitment to the profession vs. commitment to the organization and how this might affect citizenship behaviors. In addition, the operation of OCB antecedents (perceived fairness and trust) should be explored at peer and inter-group levels. For example, does trust between work groups or peers affect the OCB extended by an individual to that peer or members of that work group?
We also must consider how best to measure OCB in IT workers. Traditionally (as was done in the study reported here), OCB is assessed by asking the supervisor to rate an employee on specific behaviors reflective of each of the five OCB dimensions. Because employee-supervisor relationships may not be tightly coupled in IT, a more accurate assessment of OCB in IT might be attained by also querying coworkers, both within IT and ones outside IT who depend on and interact with the IT person.
However, even after incorporating assessments from persons possibly more likely to witness the IT professional’s OCB, reports of OCB for IT staff may still be lower than that reported for employees in other areas, due to work environment factors such as those suggested in the following:
“One day, one of the older, more seasoned IT staffers pulled me aside with a warning: `Listen. In this kind of work, you can either be smart or helpful but never both at the same time…If you’re helpful and smart, everyone will come to you all the time and expect their problems to be solved quickly and intelligently every time'” [3].
Because the IT professional’s job is typically crucial to the organization, drawing numerous requests and demands (often more than can possibly be met), we may see an “expectations-actual” effect in the ratings of OCB. Dennis Organ, the management researcher who originated the concept of OCB, noted to the authors of this article that the expectations or felt need for OCB from IT staff may be so great that even if the actual extent of OCB by IT workers exceeds that found in other areas, the ratings of OCB may be lower. IT personnel may end up having to say “no” more often than others do, and one such instance of “no” can offset a half-dozen “yes, I’ll see what I can do” helpful behaviors. So even as future research collects OCB ratings from sources beyond the supervisor, we may still see lower reports of OCB in IT and, if so, situational dynamics such as these warrant exploration.
Researchers should also consider elements specific to the IT work context that may influence OCB. The high job mobility that exists at times for IT professionals may contribute to lower OCB (note, the data discussed here was collected in 2000). Perceived ease of exit may prevent an IT professional from fully engaging in the organization and, consequently, may discourage a social exchange relationship, thereby reducing citizenship behaviors.
Also, the high-pressure, deadline-driven nature of the job may squelch OCB among IT workers. Perhaps they are too overloaded to have time to perform citizenship behaviors. A recent study conservatively estimated the burnout rate among IT professionals to be 18%, and the burned out workers reported that work overload was at the crux of their exhaustion [6]. This suggests that many IT professionals simply may not have the time or energy to exhibit OCB. An overloaded employee working under deadline may understandably push such behaviors off the to-do list in order to make progress on other tasks associated with visible deadlines.
Finally, although the sample reported here did not include contingent workers (all were in-house employees), researchers should take care to identify in-house employees vs. contractual and consulting workers. In an ongoing stream of research [1], contingent workers have been found to perform fewer citizenship behaviors than regular employees. This may be due to the type of work commonly assigned to contractual workers, or may reflect a tendency for contingent workers to engage in economic exchange relationships. In one study, for example, employees “sold over” to vendors and then contracted back to the same organization appeared to shift from social to economic exchange.
Conclusion
Organizational citizenship behaviors are vital, as they provide the backbone necessary for processes to work the way they are intended. To pave the way for citizenship behaviors to naturally occur, IT professionals and work environments must be managed in ways that kindle perceptions of trust and fairness. This will allow the firm to move more efficiently and effectively toward its goals—with fewer stumbles and fewer dropped balls.
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