Exploring the Nomological Network of Organizational Citizenship Behavior: A Review of Dimensions, Antecedents and Consequences

IntroductionThe modern era of competition is so high which was never so in the past; hence, the dynamic nature of competitive business environment necessitate employees to work under constantly challenging and changing business circumstances which have become an indispensable feature of today's organizations. Therefore, organizations will likely to have those individuals in their organizations who are willing to go beyond the delineated formal job obligations and perform extra roles for the success of their organization, which is generally termed as Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) (Somech and Drach-Zehavy, 2004). Many researchers have studied OCB and their research has shown that these extra role behaviors facilitate in improving the performance of organization and individual performance (Podsakoff et al., 2000). There is unanimity that OCB addresses silent behaviors in organizational enterprises (Barbuto et al., 2001). Employees often have opinion, information and ideas for constructive ways to improve work and work organizations. Sometimes these employees exercise voice and express opinion, information and ideas, and at other times they engage in silence and withhold their opinion, information and ideas. Misattributions for motives behind silence can lead to more incongruent consequences (both positive and negative) for employees (Van Dyne et al., 2003). Organ (1977) widened the scope of job performance by making a distinction between quantitative and qualitative measures of work outcomes. Apart from this, Organ (1977) also reevaluated the relationship between job performance and job satisfaction to include behaviors which have positive effects on social, psychological and organizational context of work.The first ever empirical study testing the relationship between job satisfaction and qualitative performance was based on the conceptualization purposed by Organ (1977) which was later on termed as OCB in published studies (Bateman and Organ, 1983). Furthermore, the first ever scale measuring OCB was developed by Smith et al. (1983) having compliance and helping as its subscale. Further elaborating the concept, Organ (1988) defined OCB as "individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization. By discretionary, we mean that the behavior is not an enforceable requirement of the role or the job description, that is, the clearly specifiable terms of the person's employment contract with the organization; the behavior is rather a matter of personal choice, such that its omission is not generally understood as punishable" (Organ, 1988, p. 4). However, Organ (1997) defined OCB as "performance that supports the social and psychological environment in which task performance takes place" (Organ, 1997, p. 95). Organ et al. (2006) elaborated the definition by adding "in the aggregate promotes the efficient and effective functioning of the organization" within the framework of OCB. It has been observed that with the passage of time, there is continuous addition in the definition of OCB by Organ. From the scrutinization of above definitions, it can be concluded that OCB is a discretionary behavior of the individual that enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of employee's performance at work place. The efficiency of organization could be increased by linking OCB with customer satisfaction, growth in revenues, financial performance and operational efficiency (Organ et al., 2006). According to Podsakoff et al. (2009) there are three advantages of this revised definition:a. It maintains the distinction between OCBs and task performance that has been empirically shown to exist (MacKenzie et al., 1991; Motowidlo and Van Scotter, 1994; and Rotundo and Sackett, 2002).b. It is more coherent with the definition of contextual performance given by Borman and Motowidlo's (1993). …