When is a good citizen valued more? Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Performance Evaluation

Abstract

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) have been found to affect supervisors’ ratings of employee performance partially because these behaviors are distinct and, thus, capture the rater’s attention. In this study, we have expanded the existing literature by recognizing the rater’s readiness to detect employee OCB. Specifically, we applied the concept of bottom-up and top-down attentional capture to test our prediction that the influence of OCB on employee performance evaluation would be dependent upon the rater’s motivation to detect behaviors that potentially increase group effectiveness. Results of hierarchical linear modeling analysis of data collected from 33 work groups at 5 state-owned manufacturing factories in China supported our hypotheses. Our findings suggest that the relationship between OCB and performance ratings is more complex than originally thought and that both rater’s cognition and group context should be taken into consideration when investigating this relationship.