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1. Introduction
Although Katz and Kahn (1966) were the first to observe employees’ extra-role behavior in the workplace, it was Bateman and Organ (1983) who coined the term “organizational citizenship behavior” (OCB). Organ (1988, p. 4) concretely 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.” According to Podsakoff et al. (2000) and Cinar et al. (2013), this definition was actually drawn from Barnard’s (1938) concept of individuals’ “willingness to cooperate” and Katz’s (1964) differentiation between one’s reliable performance of work functions and “innovative and spontaneous behaviors.” Organ (1997) later on redefined the concept, referring to OCB as any discretionary work-related behavior that goes beyond routine duties and which supports one’s social or psychological environment (Cem-Ersoy et al., 2015; Zeinabadi and Salehi, 2011).
Organ’s and his colleagues’ works on OCB became the foundation upon which succeeding authors based their own studies. Although there have been some attempts to define OCB in their own terms, these definitions still share essentially the same meaning with Organ and colleagues. Niehoff and Moorman (1993), for instance, stated that OCBs are behaviors not formally required of employees. On the other hand, Van Dyne et al. (1994) took OCB to mean a concept that encompasses an individual’s positive behaviors that are relevant to the organization. Clearly, Organ and his colleagues continue to influence the field.
OCB has been explored in various perspectives and contexts. This interest of domain scholars on OCB in both theory and practice has been motivated largely by a volume of evidence which shows that OCB is related to a number of individual level (e.g. managerial ratings of employee performance, reward allocation decisions, and a variety of withdrawal-related criteria) and organizational-level outcomes (e.g. productivity, efficiency, reduced costs, customer satisfaction, and unit-level turnover) as reported by Podsakoff et al. (2009). This has resulted to a great number of studies which covered the link between OCB and its determinants and dimensions, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Koys, 2001; Yoon and Suh, 2003). Moreover, the relationship of OCB to other related concepts was also explored by many scholars. However, there were apparent inconsistencies in their results....