Relationships Among Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Counterproductive Work Behavior, and Sexual Harassment Based on a Colleague’s Sex or Gender

ABSTRACT

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is often viewed as an unequivocal boon. However, differing motivations and external pressures can change OCB’s relationship with counterproductive work behavior (CWB) and sexual harassment. We take a novel approach to understanding the relationship between OCB, CWB and sexual harassment by exploring the role of engaging in interpersonally directed OCB and CWB because of targeted colleagues’ sex or gender. We use the terms “gendered OCB” and “gendered CWB” to refer to engaging in OCB or CWB because of the gender or sex of the target of the behavior (e.g. a colleague). We examined the relationships among OCB, CWB, and sexual harassment in a sample of 503 Prolific users (60.2% men) in the United States. Interpersonally directed OCB that was sex/gender agnostic had near-zero correlations with general CWB and sexual harassment. However, gendered OCB had significant and positive relationships with both general CWB (r = .15) and engaging in sexual harassment (r = .35). Gendered OCB’s positive association with both desirable and undesirable behaviors is reflected in models fitting best when gendered OCB loaded on both the sexual harassment and OCB latent factors. Such findings challenge views of citizenship behaviors as universally “good.”

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08959285.2024.2339233.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data avalaibility

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author Elise Anderson upon reasonable request.

The data reported in this manuscript were collected from Prolific to answer the above research questions and hypotheses. To date there are no other publications of this data nor are any planned. Poster presentations using these data were presented at SIOP’s annual 2022 conference.

Ethical statement

This study was conducted following all necessary ethics approvals from the University of Minnesota IRB (STUDY00012742).

Notes

¹ A Prolific screen for full time employment was added to be compliant with Prolific requirements to only screen via Prolific’s available options.

² Eleven out of the 12 interpersonally directed CWB items were used in the CWB-Interpersonal facet to be consistent with the eleven items used in CWB because of a colleagues’ sex/gender measure.

³ Observed power (Faul et al. 2007; 2009) to detect a small effect such as those identified between self-reported CWB and OCB (r = −.12 ρ = -.15; Dalal 2005) range from .76 for the Full Sample minimum (N = 496) for an effect of r = .12 to .92 for the Full Sample maximum (N = 503) for an effect of r = .15.

⁴ Observed power for the constrained 3-factor model (i.e. Figure 2) was .77 for effect size of RMSEA = .07. https://sempower.shinyapps.io/sempower/ (Moshagen & Erdfelder, 2016).