Happy to help, happy to change? A meta-analysis of major predictors of affiliative and change-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors

Abstract

We meta-analytically test the extent to which positive and negative affect predict change-oriented citizenship behaviors (OCB-CH). More importantly, we examine the predictive power of affect versus established predictors, including (a) job satisfaction and (b) the five-factor model (FFM) personality traits. For comparative purposes, we include as outcomes two affiliative forms of citizenship: directed at other individuals (OCB-I) and directed at the organization (OCB-O). Meta-analytic results show three noteworthy findings. First, OCB-CH is significantly more strongly related to positive affect (ρ¯̂ = 0.27, k = 28) than to negative affect (ρ¯̂ = −0.11, k = 23), and positive affect is more strongly related to OCB-CH (ρ¯̂ = 27, k = 28) than to OCB-I (ρ¯̂ = 0.17, k = 12) and OCB-O (ρ¯̂ = 0.17, k = 9). Second, a large portion of the explained variance in OCB-CH is dominated by positive and negative affect (47%), substantially more than by the FFM personality traits (31%) or by job satisfaction (23%). Third, the incremental validity for predicting OCB-CH above and beyond the other predictors is the largest for (a) positive and negative affect in combination, followed by (b) the FFM personality traits and then (c) job satisfaction. These findings indicate that affect (in particular, positive affect) is a relatively stronger driver of OCB-CH compared to the FFM traits and job satisfaction.