Interpersonal Citizenship Behavior: My Most Recent Research
My colleagues and I recently conducted some employee research on job performance. Our study sample was employees of a state agency. All of the employees were clerical/office workers, 77% of them were female, and the mean age of the employees that responded to our survey was 44. Employees completed surveys about their job attitudes, personality, and some organizational characteristics. Supervisors rated employees on their performance and interpersonal citizenship behavior.
The value of this type of research to the organization is it gives them a focused understanding of things we know drive employee performance in this specific workplace. Hopefully, some of what we learn about this workplace is generalizable to workplaces with similar characteristics. We can never tell an organization everything that affects performance, but we can give them an idea of a few things we know for certain have an effect so that they can develop some focused interventions.
In this study, we looked at some very established employee attitudes and personality traits. The big attitudes we looked at were organizational commitment (the extent they like working for the organization), job satisfaction (with pay, promotion, supervision, co-workers, and the work itself), and trust in the immediate supervisor. The personality traits we looked at were core-self evaluation (locus of control, self esteem, self-efficacy, emotional stability) and secure attachment (how well people can work autonomously and with others).
In addition to these well established variables, we also looked at organizational climate and something called interpersonal citizenship behavior (ICB). ICB is the extent to which a worker goes above and beyond their normal job description to help their co-workers.
Of all the variables we studied, only ICB was a significant predictor of employee performance in this organization. The only significant predictors of ICB were satisfaction with the supervisor and satisfaction with co-workers. The slides shown above provide the specific questions we used to assess performance, ICB, and satisfaction.
Employee personality was not a direct and significant predictor of employee performance. This was not a huge surprise since personality rarely has a direct effect on performance. The very important job attitudes trust and commitment also did not affect performance in this study, which was unexpected.
In this organization, it did not matter how the employees felt about the organization or the work itself, but it did matter how they felt about each other and their direct supervisor. These interpersonal connections facilitate the employees’ ability to do their jobs.
Relationships matter.
Here are the recommendations we made to the organization based on our specific findings:
- Encourage employees to help each other at work and recognize/reward them when they do.
- Provide supervisors the training to become excellent leaders. Recognize and reward them for their treatment of employees.
- Focus on selection and promotion systems. Hire employees with a history of helping others at work and ONLY promote to management employees that are good citizens.
- Include interpersonal citizenship in your formal performance appraisal process
About the Author: Bret L. Simmons
Welcome to my blog! Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section of my posts. I publish all constructive, non-anonymous comments. 
Given that research was heavily skewed with female respondents (77%), was there a difference in how the males responded?
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
April 2nd, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Good question, Jesse. Would you expect a difference in helping behaviors amongst men and women? The research does not support that to my knowledge. A difference in satisfaction between men and women? Again, not supported that I am aware of. Oddly most of what we know about leadership and management comes from studies that are scewed with male respondents. We will certainly look at controlling for gender when we write it up and providing some explanation, but I suspect there will not be that much to say. Thanks! Bret
[Reply]
Jesse Reply:
April 2nd, 2010 at 5:07 pm
I wasn’t quite sure whether to expect a difference or not. I was more curious if there were any differences.
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
April 4th, 2010 at 10:00 am
we have not tested it yet but you can be sure we will try. The only problem will be the very small cell size of the male group. Thanks, bret
[Reply]
Good research. Where are you submitting it to?
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
April 2nd, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Not sure. We have interesting findings, but a small sample size. Still have to write it up! Thanks, Bret
[Reply]
Very interesting hypotheses and findings. One thing that struck me is that trust and commitment did not appear to affect employee satisfaction. I’m wondering what your take is on the difference and importance of looking at employee engagement vs. satisfaction. I believe that employee engagement is actually a stronger predictor of performance. The main reason is that “satisfaction” can be fleeting while engagement indicates a longer-term reaction with the organization.
For example, if you ask me this morning whether I’m satisfied with my husband right after we’ve had a big fight, my answer may be no. Although, if you ask me if I’m engaged in the relationship, my answer would likely still be yes. My satisfaction is an indicator of a more immediate situation while my engagement in the relationship (personal or work) is a longer term decision based on the overall experience.
Thoughts?
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
April 4th, 2010 at 10:08 am
Hi Trish! Normally satisfaction is examined for its affect on commitment and not the other way around. And since satisfaction and trust are both attitudinal in nature, I prefer to not model them as antecedent to one another. Both attitudes should arise simultaneously as a result of an individual evaluating her situation at work. My research does not suggest that individuals did not have trust in the supervisor. They did. My research simply says this trust was not a statistically significant predictor of employee performance in this sample. I’ve measure trust and performance in other studies and it has been a significant predictor for me once, but not all the time. But there is other research to suggest that trust does predict performance, which is why I model it that way.
Your question about the stability over time of satisfaction and engagement is an interesting one. Both are attitudes, and while attitudes do change once formed they are relatively stable. Our attitudes about others, and the resulting behavior toward them, does change because our attitudes change the relationship, and the relationship also changes our attitudes. It’s a complex interaction.
Probably more than you wanted to hear, but thanks for the question! Bret
[Reply]
Thanks for posting the research findings along with presentations. That was really good read on blog.
One more – I liked the post about -”Business books” ( Popular press books ).
I am just wondering – I tried to find the blogs – which are devoted to themes on Organization Behavior and could not find many,( Though there are many on leadership – including alltop ).
It will be great to build a list of Organization behavior related blogs.
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
April 7th, 2010 at 10:26 am
You are right, Santosh, I too have found very few blogs specifically on OB. Leadership and management blogs are as close as you can come and that works well for me. Check out my blog roll. There I list some of the blogs I read the most in OB related topics. Thanks! Bret
[Reply]