Doing good at work, doing good at home? Examining the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior and the interface between work and family life. (FWOTM683)

During the past 20 years, research on the effects of organizational citizenship behavior (i.e., those behaviors that go beyond an employee's job description, such as helping a colleague) focused on the positive outcomes for the organization and the employee performing OCB. Only recently voices were raised to examine the potential downsides of OCB outside the work domain. The few studies examining the effect of OCB on the work-family interface (i.e., the interference of one's work role with the family role) reported beneficial as well as detrimental effects.

In this project, we advance a theoretical model that explains the underlying mechanisms between OCB and interface between work and family life. The recent differentiation between proactive OCB (performed out of self-interest) and reactive OCB (performed to meet the needs of others) plays a key role in this model. Our basic assumption is that proactive OCB has a positive influence on the work-family interface, whereas the influence of reactive OCB depends on whether the OCB performer feels obliged to perform OCB or not.

In particular, we examine: (1) how proactive/reactive OCB and the work-family interface mutually influence each other, (2) how the work-family interface mediates the effect of proactive/reactive OCB on employees' personal and their partners' well-being, and (3) how the interference of the family role with one's work role (i.e., family-work interface) influences the performance of proactive/reactive OCB.

Keywords:organizational citizenship behavior, work-family interface

Disciplines:Social psychology not elsewhere classified, Social psychology, Applied psychology, General psychology