title: When do business units benefit more from collective citizenship behavior of management teams? An upper echelons perspective.
abstract: Drawing upon the notion of managerial discretion from upper echelons theory, we theorize which external contingencies moderate the relationship between collective organizational citizenship behavior (COCB) and unit performance. Focusing on business unit (BU) management teams, we hypothesize that COCB of BU management teams enhances BU performance and that this impact depends on environmental uncertainty and BU management-team decision latitude, 2 determinants of managerial discretion. In particular, the positive effect of COCB is stronger when environmental uncertainty or the BU management-team decision latitude is greater. Time-lagged data from 109 BUs of a telecommunications company support the hypotheses. Additional exploratory analysis shows that the positive moderating effect of environmental uncertainty is further amplified at higher levels of BU management-team decision latitude. Overall, this study extends the internally focused view in the micro OCB literature by introducing external contingencies for the COCB-unit-performance relationship.
authors.affiliation: Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
authors.forename: Wu
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
authors.forename: Yaping
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Gong
authors.affiliation: Business School and Research Center for Corporate Innovation and Competitiveness, Renmin University of China.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006126:Group Processes; D006801:Humans; D010559:Personnel Management; D011582:Psychological Theory; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D035501:Uncertainty