Who will go the extra mile? Selecting organizational citizens with a personality-based structured job interview
- PDF / 890,150 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 67 Downloads / 153 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Who will go the extra mile? Selecting organizational citizens with a personality-based structured job interview Anna Luca Heimann 1
&
Pia V. Ingold 1
&
Maike E. Debus 2
&
Martin Kleinmann 1
Accepted: 16 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) are important drivers of organizational effectiveness. Yet, there exist no established tools for selecting employees with a propensity to engage in OCB. Given that personality traits describe typical behavioral tendencies and are established OCB predictors, we propose that personality assessment is a useful approach for selecting employees who are likely to exhibit OCB. To test this proposition, we developed a structured job interview measuring the Big Five traits and then compared this interview to a personality self-report measure to determine which method of personality assessment works best for selecting organizational citizens. Employees (N = 223) from various occupations participated in the structured job interview and completed the personality self-report in a simulated selection setting. We then obtained supervisor ratings of employees’ OCB. Results supported the assumption that structured job interviews can be specifically designed to assess the Big Five personality traits and, most importantly, to predict OCB. Interview ratings of specific personality traits differentially predicted different types of OCB (i.e., OCB-compliance, OCB-helping, and OCB-initiative) and explained incremental variance in OCB over and above personality self-reports and verbal cognitive ability. Taken together, these findings expand our knowledge about dispositional predictors of OCBs, personality assessment in selection, and the design of job interviews. Keywords Organizational citizenship behavior . Personnel selection . Structured interviews . Personality traits
Organizations can benefit greatly from employees who engage in organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB; Koys, 2001; Podsakoff, Whiting, Podsakoff & Blume, 2009). By definition, OCB refers to behaviors that contribute to the social and psychological context at work—such as upholding the rules, helping others, and taking initiative in advancing the organization (Organ, 1997; Organ, Podsakoff & MacKenzie, 2006). Underlining its importance in the organizational context, OCB has been termed the “social lubricant” that keeps an organization running (Smith, Organ & Near, 1983) or the “catalyst” that sparks task performance (Borman & Motowidlo, 1997). As such, OCB has generated an enormous research interest: A simple PsycINFO search * Anna Luca Heimann [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Binzmuehlestrasse 14/Box 12, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland
2
School of Business, Economics, and Society, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany
shows that there were over 3000 publications revolving around OCB and related constructs. Given OCB’s relevance, researchers concluded that “it would appear wo
Data Loading...
