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A historical review of the development of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and its implications for the twenty-first century

Lanndon Ocampo (Department of Industrial Engineering, Cebu Technological University, Cebu City, The Philippines)
Venus Acedillo (School of Management, University of the Philippines Cebu, Cebu City, The Philippines)
Alin Mae Bacunador (School of Management, University of the Philippines Cebu, Cebu City, The Philippines)
Charity Christine Balo (School of Management, University of the Philippines Cebu, Cebu City, The Philippines)
Yvonne Joreen Lagdameo (School of Management, University of the Philippines Cebu, Cebu City, The Philippines)
Nickha Shanen Tupa (School of Management, University of the Philippines Cebu, Cebu City, The Philippines)

Personnel Review

ISSN: 0048-3486

Article publication date: 25 May 2018

Issue publication date: 25 May 2018

7448

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to provide a historical account of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) based on the existing literature.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper performs keywords search of published articles from 1930 to 2017 in widely used research databases.

Findings

The historical review shows that the OCB, as a field of study, was slow to develop. Although it has been introduced in the late 1970s and officially defined in the 1980s, its origins can be traced back to the 1930s. Despite this, OCB is generally regarded as a relatively new construct and has become one of the biggest subjects studied in the literature. OCB has reached far and wide into the business and management domains, supporting the fact that the well-being employees and their behaviors can greatly affect organizations’ effectiveness and performance. Having been the topic of a significant number of studies, there have been inconsistent research findings regarding the concepts. Furthermore, some concepts have been noted to overlap, with several scholars using different terms for essentially similar concepts.

Originality/value

The advent of technology and globalization has greatly affected organizations today which resulted in increased competition in the global business. Firms have started to look into the behavior exhibited by employees as a means of achieving competitive advantage, such as OCB. Voluminous works have been conducted regarding the study of OCB; however, none have been recorded to make an in-depth exploration of when and how it first surfaced. Since its official introduction, explorations regarding OCB have dramatically increased, most especially in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, this has resulted in an increasing difficulty to keep up with the theoretical and empirical developments in the literature. As interest in OCB continues to grow, coherent integration of the concept becomes progressively more complex and necessary. This paper looks into the chronological evolution of the OCB, giving precise details of its development from the time it was first conceptualized up until the present wherein OCB has been used to indicate organizational effectiveness and performance.

Keywords

Citation

Ocampo, L., Acedillo, V., Bacunador, A.M., Balo, C.C., Lagdameo, Y.J. and Tupa, N.S. (2018), "A historical review of the development of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and its implications for the twenty-first century", Personnel Review, Vol. 47 No. 4, pp. 821-862. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-04-2017-0136

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

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