Engagement of organizational citizenship behavior: does gender make differences?

Abstract

Although number of scholars attempted to show the gender differences in many organizationally relevant areas over the past decades, treatment and expectations of female and male at their workplace are still observed as differentiated. Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is the behavior that employees engage in actions that are organizationally significant and not prescribed in their formal job description. OCB has been related to number of positive consequences at both individual and organizational level. Therefore, scholars have paid their attention in studying this growing area. The amount of engagement in OCB may vary based on the gender differences. The objective of this study was to examine the gender differences in engagement of OCB. A sample of 160 employees (N=180, 80 Males and 80 Females) was drawn from public service sector in Sri Lanka. Validated questionnaire was used to collect the data. Five dimensions of OCB namely conscientiousness, sportsmanship, civic virtue, helping behavior, and courtesy have been used to test the differences. The findings revealed significant gender differences on three dimensions of OCB. While conscientiousness and helping behavior have shown female on the higher side, sportsmanship has shown male on the higher side. But, in terms of other dimensions civic virtue and courtesy the differences were insignificant falling far away from the probability level of .05. However, analysis on overall OCB shown negligible gender differences suggest that males and females are both almost equal in engaging in OCB. Nevertheless, the results supporting in case of the dimensions of helping behavior females are on the higher side suggesting that female are generally more empathic or sympathetic than male and therefore, they are more helpfulness, kindness, and compassion than male. However, in case of dimension of sportsmanship male are on the higher side suggesting that males are willing to tolerate inconveniences without complaining petty grievances. This is consistent with the previous findings that male possess certain characteristics such as happily taking risk, stillness in a crisis situation, and the ability to work under pressure. Findings of this study have number of implications and have shown new avenues for future research.