The Impact of Justice Type on Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Do Outcome Favorability and Leader Behavior Matter?

This paper uses a social exchange theory framework to examine whether justice type (procedural, interpersonal, and informational), leader behavior (task-oriented or relationship-oriented behavior) and outcome favorability (favorable and unfavorable) all interact to influence organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Cooperative and competing goal structures, along with the social exchange rules of reciprocity, rationality, and altruism defined by Meeker (1971), are used to examine if a specific type of leader behavior is most likely to encourage OCB when employees receive unfavorable work outcomes. The results in this paper suggest that employees engage in higher levels of OCB when the supervisor exhibits high levels of leadership behavior and lower levels of OCB when the supervisor exhibits low levels of leadership behavior, regardless of whether that leader behavior is relationship-oriented or task-oriented.