Learning through organizational citizenship behavior

Abstract

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCBs) be characterized with going beyond formal role requirements and wide participation for organizational interests. Previous research on organizational citizenship behavior draw a general conclusion that organizational citizenship behavior had a critical relation with organizational functioning. But little work recovers the internal mechanism by which organizational citizenship behavior facilitate organizational performance and effectiveness. Based on social embeddedness theory, this paper proposes that organizational citizenship behavior, especially, the social participation, advocacy participation, functional participation and focus on tasks contribute to internal learning, explorative learning, emergent learning, and exploitation learning between individual, and consequently enhance organizational functioning and performance. In the last section the paper briefly discussed the theoretical contributions of the analysis framework and give suggestion about future research direction.