Workplace ostracism and organizational citizenship behavior: the roles of organizational identification and collectivism

Abstract

A considerable amount of research has revealed that ostracism is an important social phenomenon that substantially impacts the way people treat and are treated by others. Despite the importance of ostracism, little attention has been paid to workplace ostracism (WOS). This is surprising given that workplace is one of the most important social contexts where ostracism occurs. Recently, western scholars begun to examine workplace ostracism, and their initial evidence suggested that workplace ostracism has significantly detrimental impacts on employees and organizations as well. Since workplace ostracism has rarely been investigated in non-Western contexts, little is known about whether the west results can be generalized to new contexts such as China, and more importantly, how cultural factors (e.g., values) will influence the function of workplace ostracism in those contexts. The major purpose of the study is to examine the influence of workplace ostracism on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in Chinese organizational settings. Based on social identity theory and research of collectivism, we further explore the mediating role of organizational identification in the WOS-OCB relationship and the moderating effect of individual collectivism on the relationship between workplace ostracism and organizational identification. Hierarchical regression analyses on a matched sample of 258 employee-supervisor dyads from two large oil and gas companies in Xin-jiang province show that: (1) workplace ostracism relates negatively to organizational citizenship behavior; (2) organizational identification fully mediates the relationship between workplace ostracism and organizational citizenship behavior; (3) employee collectivism moderates the relationship between workplace ostracism and organizational identification such that workplace ostracism has a stronger negative effect on organizational identification when employee collectivism values are high rather than low. Our research contributes to the workplace ostracism literature by answering how and why workplace ostracism is related to employee organizational citizenship behavior in Chinese context. Managerial implications and limitations of the study are discussed.

本文旨在研究職場排斥對員工組織公民行為的影響,并以社會認同理論和文化價值觀為基礎,研究員工組織認同和集體主義傾向在以上關系中所起的中介及調節作用。研究以兩家石化企業中的258名員工和102名主管為研究對象,對問卷調查所獲得的匹配數據進行層級回歸分析,結果表明,職場排斥對員工組織公民行為具有顯著的正向影響,員工組織認同在其中起完全中介作用;員工的集體主義傾向越明顯,職場排斥與員工組織認同之間的負向聯系就越強。