Forced to Be a Good Citizen: The Mechanisms and Boundary Conditions of Daily Compulsory Citizenship

Abstract

Compulsory citizenship behavior (CCB) refers to employees’ engagement in citizenship behaviors that go against their own will. The literature is currently unclear about whether the implications are positive, negative, or a nuanced combination of both. To address this confusion, we attempt to clarify the concurrent enrichment and depleting effects of daily CCB on employees’ subsequent organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and interpersonal deviance. Drawing on the enrichment- and depletion-based perspectives of helping behaviors, we theorize that employees’ daily organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) and daily depletion are core mechanisms that explain the benefits and costs of daily CCB. In addition, we also theorize that employees’ extraversion and leader-member exchange (LMX) are critical boundary conditions of the effects of employees’ daily CCB. By using an experience sampling method, we collected daily data from 186 full-time employees across 10 working days (twice a day), yielding 1,551 valid daily responses. The results of multilevel path analyses showed that: (a) CCB has a positive indirect effect on subsequent OCB via increased OBSE, and LMX strengthens this positive indirect effect, and (b) CCB also has a positive indirect effect on subsequent interpersonal deviance via increased ego depletion, but extraversion buffers this positive indirect effect. Theoretical and practical implications are further discussed.