The curvilinear relationship between organizational citizenship behavior and task performance: the moderating role of task interdependence.

Abstract

In this study, the influence of task interdependence on the curvilinear relationship between (time spent on) Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) and task performance is examined. The main expectation of the current study was the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect of time spent on OCB on task performance. More specifically, time spent on OCB has a positive effect on task performance until a breaking point and becomes negative afterwards. Furthermore, it was expected that for low task interdependence, the relationship between time spent on OCB and task performance would be curvilinear and linear for high task interdependence. A regression-analysis have been performed on survey data from 185 respondents to analyze these relationships. The curvilinear relationship between time spent on OCB and task performance was insignificant and looked close to linear. When task interdependence was added as a moderator, the model became significant but the predictors did not prove to predict task performance significantly. Against expectations, for low task interdependence, the relationship between time spent on OCB and task performance looked curvilinear, whereas this relationship looked linear for high task interdependence. However, these results should be interpreted with caution because the sample size was not large enough, and had a power of .42 on the tested model with time spent on OCB, task interdependence and task performance. Furthermore, people working from home due to the corona crisis may have influenced the data. Therefore, this study should be repeated with a good representation of the