Going beyond borders: Work centrality, emotional intelligence and employee optimism as predictors of organizational citizenship behavior

Abstract

As global market competition heightens and societies becoming more and more complex, the task that now confronts management is no longer in retaining their best performers, but in building a culture that encourages them to go beyond their usual work schedule to engage in other on-the-job, work-related behavior, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) that is not related to the formal organizational reward system, but promotes the effective functioning of the organizations. Some dispositional variables have been linked to the performance of OCB. Thus, this study attempted to investigate work centrality, emotional intelligence, and employee optimism as predictors of OCB (N = 175) among civil defense corps in the Southeast, Nigeria. The results of the regression analyses computed, which revealed that work centrality has a significant positive predictive value on OCB is in line with our first speculation. Consistent with hypothesis 2, emotional intelligence significantly and positively predicted OCB. In the third hypothesis, the result revealed that employee optimism significantly and positively predicted OCB. The implications of these findings for organizations may be a reemphasis on the importance of these variables in driving OCB. The limitations of the study were highlighted and suggestions for further studies were made.

Keywords

• work centrality
• emotional intelligence
• employee optimism
• ocb