Personality and Citizenship Behavior: The Mediating Role of Job Satisfaction

Using meta-analytic path analysis, the authors tested several structural models linking agreeableness and conscientiousness to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Results showed that the 2 personality traits had both direct effects and indirect effects-through job satisfaction-on overall OCB. Meta-analytic moderator analyses that distinguished between individual- and organization-targeted citizenship behaviors (OCB-I and OCB-O) showed that agreeableness was more closely related with OCB-I and conscientiousness with OCB-O. Finally, the path analyses predicting OCB-I and OCB-O offered further support for the general hypothesis that these 2 constructs are distinct. That is, the results of these analyses revealed that agreeableness had both direct and indirect effects on OCB-I but only indirect effects on OCB-O, and that for conscientiousness the pattern of direct and indirect effects was exactly opposite (direct and indirect effects on OCB-O but only indirect effects on OCB-I).