Work and Well-Being

How and to what extent does

positive affect

influence

organizational citizenship behaviours?

January 2006

Introduction

This essay is broken down into various sections to develop the ‘building blocks’ upon which we can provide an answer to the question.

In section 1, we will look at the core constructs of ‘positive affect’ (PA) and ‘organizational citizenship behaviours’ (OCBs).

In section 2, we will answer the question of how PA influences OCBs by looking at some of the main theories and models.

In section 3, the extent to which PA influences OCBs will be considered by reviewing the empirical evidence.

Finally, section 4 attempts to draw conclusions and provides an overall discussion.

Section 1 - Definitions

This section looks at the constructs of ‘positive affect’ and ‘organizational citizenship behaviours’.

Positive Affect (PA)
Between the 1930s, when it started to emerge as a construct of interest to organizational research, and the mid-1980s, affect at work was construed almost exclusively in terms of job satisfaction (Brief & Weiss, 2002). However, Organ & Near (1985) argued that job satisfaction has both a cognitive (belief, judgement, comparison) as well as an affective (emotional, feeling) dimension, whereas most measures of job satisfaction tended to focus on the cognitive element. This distinction is important: Weiss & Cropanzano (1996) see affective experiences as antecedent to job satisfaction while it may also be regarded as a component of job satisfaction. In summary, Affect is no longer regarded as synonymous with job satisfaction.

The term ‘Affect’ is broad (“a subjective feeling state” – Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995) but is typically construed as encompassing two relatively distinct phenomena – moods and emotions (Fisher (2000);