Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Gender: Expectations and Attributions for Performance‪.‬

Recent research suggests that women are more likely to participate in the helping dimension of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) whereas men are more likely to participate in the civic virtue dimension. Three laboratory studies were conducted to test the hypotheses that observers expect employees to participate in gender-congruent OCBs and that, when exhibited, observers are more likely to attribute gender-incongruent OCBs than gender-congruent OCBs to impression management motives. Results indicated that OCBs in general were expected more of women than of men. Only under specific conditions were OCB-civic virtue behaviors expected more of men. Additionally, participants were more likely to attribute men's OCB than women's OCB to impression management motives. Implications and future research suggestions are discussed. Over the past two decades, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has become a popular research topic among industrial / organizational psychologists. One line of research has investigated the degree to which OCB impacts performance appraisal ratings (see Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000 for a review). Other research has begun to explore the relationship between OCB and gender (Allen & Rush, 2001; Ehrhart & Godfrey, 2003; Heilman & Chen, 2005; Kidder, 2002). The goal of the current research was to replicate previous research on the link between OCB and gender using an alternative methodology and to extend that previous research by investigating differences in attributions made by the perceivers of such behavior.