Good Soldiers, Good Actors, and Good Learners? Self-Improvement as a Motive for OCB

Previous research has emphasized the role of prosocial values, organizational concern, and impression management as driving motives behind organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). However, it is likely that employees are also motivated to engage in OCB in order to self-improve. As such, our theoretical and empirical understanding of citizenship motives is incomplete. Therefore, in this research, we explain why self-improvement motives are critical to our understanding of OCB. Further, we develop an OCB motives scale that includes a self-improvement motive. We subsequently demonstrate the scale’s content adequacy, validity, and reliability. Then, using two independent samples of multi-source data, we find that self-improvement motives are positively related to individually focused OCB (OCBI) and organizationally focused OCB (OCBO). Further, we show how prosocial values, organizational concern, and impression management all positively moderate the relationship between self-improvement motives and OCB. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.