The Organizational Citizenship Behaviors normativity: A research on employees of Buenos Aires province (Argentina).

Abstract

It is generally observed that employees adopting Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs) are valorized by their superiors. Given that such valorization is one of the main criteria to define a social norm, we hypothesized that these behaviors could also meet the other normative criteria and could be defined as being social norms.
Four populations (a population of managers and three populations of subordinates) responded to an organizational citizenship questionnaire, each group faced with one of the paradigms highlighting the existence of a norm. The ma­nagers were asked to indicate, facing each item, if they would appreciate an employee adopting the presented behavior (legislator’s paradigm, designed to verify the valorization of the adopted behaviors); the subordinates were asked to check each item according to the self-presentation paradigm in a neutral, over-normative or counter-normative way (the three orders of this paradigm allowing to examine, on the one hand, the adoption of the citizenship behaviors, adoption which refers to the descriptive aspect of the norms, on the other hand the awareness of their valorization).
The results confirm our hypothesis: managers significantly appreciate CCOs; the adoption of CCOs is effective in subordinates; there are more positive answers when participants have to provide good self-image and more negative ones in the opposite case. These data will be discussed under a conceptual and an applied angle.