The competitive nature of today’s global market place compels organisations to constantly seek out ways to improve their performance. For many organisations, the ability to compete ultimately determines whether they will succeed or fail. The ongoing challenge for firms is to identify new ways of utilizing existing resources to improve their performance, effectiveness and ability to compete.

How can businesses do more to perform better and become more competitive with less?

While some businesses are introducing new systems and technology, others are looking at ways to motivate their employees, so they become more efficient, productive and committed to organisational objectives.Commissions, bonuses and other incentives are all used by organisations to encourage employees to be more productive, sell more and do more. Is this the only way? Is there another way to motivate organisational members to genuinely want to do more and go that extra mile?

This type of employee behavior is called Organisational Citizenship Behavior (OCB)and is defined as discretionary behavior that, is not part of a job description, is not formally recognized by an organisation’s reward system and contributes to organisational effectiveness. OCB is associated with improved employee performance, which is suggested to contribute to an organisation’s performance, effectiveness and ability to compete in the marketplace. The ability by leaders to cultivate OCB among their employees may indeed be instrumental to maximizing their business’s performance and competitive advantage.

Work behavior that is in some way beyond the reach of traditional measures of job performance but holds promise for long-term organizational success is receiving increasing theoretical attention as the challenge of global competition highlights the importance of organizational innovation, flexibility, productivity, and responsiveness to changing external conditions. In the last decade, many terms have been used to describe such behavior, including organizational citizenship behavior.

Source: Van Dyne et al. (1994)