Happy to help, happy to change? A meta-analysis of major predictors of affiliative and change-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors

Fairness matters for change: A multilevel study on organizational change fairness, proactive motivation, and change-oriented OCB

The success of organizational change often hinges on the perception of fairness within a change unit. This group-level organizational change fairness is crucial for enhancing proactive motivation states and fostering positive change-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Rooted in the proactive motivation model, this study establishes a comprehensive multilevel framework to investigate the influence of group-level organizational change fairness on employees' change-oriented OCB. It explores the mediating role of three proactive motivational states and the moderating impact of perceived change impact. Analyzing data collected from 597 employees within 107 teams across 43 Chinese companies, our findings indicate that group-level perceived organizational change fairness significantly predicts employees' change-oriented OCB through organizational change self-efficacy, involvement, and positive emotional experiences. Furthermore, the study reveals that group-level perceived change impact moderates the relationship between group-level fairness perception and both change self-efficacy and positive emotional experiences, with stronger associations observed under conditions of low perceived change impact. These insights notably advance our understanding of the cross-level determinants influencing change-oriented OCB through perceived fairness and proactive motivation. Managers should focus on developing fairness perceptions to stimulate OCB by fostering employees' proactive motivation states, particularly during low-impact organizational changes. Our findings provide valuable implications for organizational change management practices.

Catalysts for Change: The Impact of Reflective Conversations on Leaders' Hope and Change-Oriented Behaviors

How can leaders effectively navigate challenges and drive positive change in the workplace? This research introduces reflective conversations as a powerful catalyst for leaders' change-oriented initiatives. Integrating transformative learning theory and hope theory, we suggest that reflective conversations improve leaders' sense of hope and subsequently facilitate their transformational leadership and creative behaviors. We further introduce hardships (Study 1) and relationship quality (Studies 2 and 3) as key boundary conditions. We conducted a content validation study to validate our measure of reflection conversation and further conducted two experience sampling studies and one online experiment to test the transformational power of daily reflective conversations. The results reveal that when leaders experience hardships or have high-quality relationships with others, reflective conversations can be a powerful force in terms of fueling their sense of hope and inspiring them to exercise transformational leadership and creative behaviors.

When high work engagement is negative for family tasks: mechanisms and boundary conditions

Background

Typically, work engagement is positively related to beneficial job outcomes. Earlier studies, however, revealed a "dark side" of work engagement showing negative effects such as more work-family conflict. Using a resource perspective, our study seeks to better understand why and when these negative effects of work engagement occur. Specifically, we test a new model in which the relationship of work engagement with work-family conflict is mediated by organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and work rumination. Moreover, we argue that employees' resource-building strategies (i.e., job crafting) and resource levels (i.e., psychological capital) buffer resource depletion due to high work engagement.

Methods

We tested our assumptions in a field study that involved data collected on three measurement points with 523 employees from Nigeria. The measures consist of Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, Organizational Citizenship Behavior Scale, Work Rumination Scale, Psychological Capital Scale, Job Crafting Measure, Work-family Conflict Scale, and demographic variables. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to test the hypotheses.

Results and discussion

Results from latent structure equation modelling confirm that work rumination mediates the positive relationship between work engagement and work-family conflict. Additionally, our findings suggest that behavioral engagement (i.e.,OCB) and work rumination mediate the relationship between work engagement and work-family conflict. Moreover, psychological capital mitigated the relationships of work engagement with work rumination, but not job crafting. Our study helps to better understand the "dark side" of work engagement and offers implications on how to mitigate its detrimental relationship with work-family conflict.

Workplace Spirituality as an Alternative Model for Promoting Commitment to Change and Change-Oriented Organisational Citizenship Behaviour

Considering that the relationship between workplace spirituality and organisational change has only recently sparked scholarly interest, the connection could be more evident, as research has only recently begun. Furthermore, there is a growing tendency to add spirituality as the fourth dimension to sustainability in addition to the environment, social responsibility, and the economy. This study contributes to the academic literature by examining the influence of workplace spirituality on lecturers’ responses to change in their commitment to change and change-oriented organizational citizenship behaviour (C-OCB). Private universities in Banjarmasin, Indonesia, were selected to research these links. To collect data from 1050 instructors, self-administered questionnaires were used, and structural equation modelling (SEM) was performed. The findings demonstrated that the workplace spirituality level, exemplified by a solid connection to a higher power, humanity, and nature, affects the lecturers’ commitment to change leading to change-oriented organizational citizenship behaviour (C-OCB), a dimension of OCB less researched. The findings offer a novel perspective on the relationship between workplace spirituality, lecturers’ attitudes towards change, and change-oriented organizational citizenship behaviour (C-OCB) in higher education. Since this result has not been examined in the context of change in higher education, several consequences and suggestions for future research emerge. More studies could be used in future research, given that the literature in this area is still in its early stages. The current work is expected to spark future research on this intriguing and fertile issue.

Co-workership: development of an assessment tool

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to develop an easy-to-use, theoretically well-founded and psychometrically sound assessment tool of the concept co-workership.

Design/methodology/approach

Firstly, inductively generated examples of favourable and unfavourable co-worker behaviours were collected, clustered and then expressed as frequency-based Likert-type scale items. Data were obtained from 825 Swedish white collar workers and military personnel. A factor analysis (principal axis factoring with oblique rotation) resulted in a seven-factor solution built up by 30 items and forming the instrument Co-Worker Questionnaire (Co-Worker Q).

Findings

The factors have a strong resemblance to the content of dominating models of leadership, followership, organizational citizenship behaviour and leader–member exchange. The factor scales had relatively high reliability (high Cronbach’s alpha coefficients and low standard errors of measurement). Regarding discriminability, women scored more favourably on five of the factors, men on one factor and age differences were noted on two factors.

Research limitations/implications

Shortcomings include the lack of data on possibly related aspects including person factors, such as personality and socio-economic status, and contextual factors such as more detailed data on the type of work environment and organizational culture.

Practical implications

The instrument has an easy-to-use format and can be used in organization development interventions with a co-workership focus and in individualized coaching or mentoring programmes.

Originality/value

The co-workership concept has so far mainly been used in the Nordic countries. The development of the Co-Worker Q opens up for broader applications.