Displaying Employees’ Organisational Citizenship Behaviour at the Workplace: The Impact of Superior's Emotional Intelligence and Moderating Impact of Leader - Member Exchange

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of superior's emotional intelligence (EI) and leader-member exchange (LMX) on organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). Using a sample of 200 supervisor-subordinates dyads working in four financial institutions located in Klang Valley, Malaysia, this study hypothesised that emotional intelligence and leader-member exchange would have a stronger relationship to organisational citizenship behaviour. The results revealed that use of emotions (UOE), other's emotions appraisal (OEA), and regulation of emotion (ROE) were the dimensions of emotional intelligence to predict employee organisational citizenship behaviour. Both UOE and OEA shared the same findings with 52.7% of the variance on conscientiousness respectively. On the other hand, OEA was also found to be significantly influencing sportsmanship with only 6.3% of the variance and ROE was found to predict civic virtue with 26.7% of the variance. Meanwhile, LMX of subordinates was found to moderate the relationships between only one EI dimension and OCB-civic virtue. A difference between male and female emotional intelligence and organisational citizenship behaviour were also analysed. Future research and practical implications are also discussed.