A systematic literature review on organizational citizenship behavior: conceptualization, antecedents, and future research directions

Abstract

AbstractThis review study investigated two main questions on organizational citizenship behavior: first, how is OCB conceptualized in management studies? And the second question is, what are the antecedents of OCB in management studies? The study used a systematic review strategy to address the above questions. In this respect, clear inclusion and exclusion criteria were employed to select 53 relevant articles from the total of 2367 OCB articles obtained from various databases for analysis purpose. Other research methods were also used in the study, such as the collected data, which was analyzed via content analysis and finally presented descriptively using a descriptive research design. The finding shows that these days, OCB and OCBI/OCBO are still understood from 1988 Organ’s OCB constructs. There are limited studies on individuals’ dispositions, task characteristics, leadership behaviors, and group characteristics as types of antecedents of OCB in the existing literature. It is recommended to develop advanced OCB constructs that can be applicable to all types of organizations. As shown by the shortage of OCB studies in some types of antecedents, future researchers are advised to conduct their studies on individuals’ dispositions, task characteristics, leadership behaviors, and group characteristics using the conceptual framework suggested by this study.

Keywords

• Organizational citizenship behavior
• conceptualization
• antecedents
• systematic review
• management studies
• Huifen (Helen) Cai, Middlesex University Business School, UK