Negative and Positive Networks and Citizenship Behaviors towards Co-workers

Motivated by Labianca and Brass's revival of the importance of negative networks to understand employees behaviors, we study how employees show citizenship behavior towards their co-workers (OCB-I) when they have the co-workers at workplace who dislike them as well as the coworkers who feel friendship to them. We first suggest that employees tend not to show OCB- I as the in-degree centrality of negative networks increases, while they are willing to show OCB-I, when they have the co- workers to feel them as friends. Next, we argue that the negative impact of negative networks on OCB –I will be mitigated by the in-degree centrality of friendship network. Findings from a study of a joint-venture life insurance companys headquarters support our hypothesis. We conclude with a discussion on the theoretical contribution of our study to OCB and social networks as well as direction for future study.