The Role of Job Satisfaction, Job Ambivalence, and Emotions at Work in Predicting Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Various mostly cross-sectional studies have established that job satisfaction is related to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). A major goal of the present study was to show that job ambivalence (i.e., the coexistence of positive and negative job evaluations) moderates the job satisfaction-OCB relationship. To this end, job satisfaction, job ambivalence, frequency of positive and negative emotions at work, dispositional positive and negative affectivity, and OCB were gathered from employees at time 1. About 2 months later, OCB was assessed by both peer-ratings and self-ratings. As predicted, the relationship between job satisfaction and both peer-rated and self-rated OCB was stronger the lower the experienced job ambivalence. Further findings showed that job satisfaction mediated the relationship between positive emotions and OCB, and that this indirect effect of positive emotions was conditional on low job ambivalence. Negative emotions, though negatively related to OCB, did not contribute to predicting OCB beyond positive emotions.