Despotic leadership and Organizational Citizenship Behaviour

Studies show that Organ and Bateman introduced the term Organizational citizenship Behaviour
(OCB) in 1983 (Thiruvenkadam, 2017).OCB is explained as work-related behavior (Moorman, 1991)
and discretionary act which employees do according to their own will and not bound to do under
specified job description.it is not rewarded formally by the company (Organ, 1988) such as increased
salary, bonuses or designation up-gradation (Zhang, 2011).

(Organ, 1988) emphasized that OCB must “promote the effective functioning of the organization”.
According to (Organ, 2015), OCB is ‘doing something good’ that is not part of contractual obligation
such as helping others, enduring temporary problems in the company, taking part in constructive
discussions and mitigating the interpersonal conflicts. OCB is not enforceable and presents individual
motivation within an organizational context (Campbell Pickford & Joy, 2016). (Williams & Anderson,
1991) categorize the OCB dimensions into OCB-I and OCB-O; altruism and courtesy grouped as
individual-directed behavior (OCB-I) and conscientiousness, sportsmanship and civic virtue grouped
as organization-directed behavior (OCB-0). OCB-I is focused in this study. OCBs toward individual
includes helping co-workers, assisting supervisor, listening to others, helping new employees and
sharing knowledge and information with co-workers (Chen, Niu, Wang, Yang, & Tsaur, 2009).

Leader behavior is crucial to employees’ attitude, they can enhance OCB if they concern about the
interests of subordinates (Veličkovska, 2017). Employees facing despotic leadership are less
concerned about co-workers and organization, instead, they prefer their own interests thus
reluctant to involve in organizational citizenship behavior (Naseer et al., 2016). Despotic leaders are
autocratic and limit the employee's participation in decision making (Aronson, 2001; De Hoogh &
Den Hartog, 2008).

The prevailing theoretical basis for OCB is social exchange theory (Eisenberger, Huntington,
Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986; Shore & Wayne, 1993; Van Dyne, Graham, & Dienesch, 1994). Employing
the social exchange theory (Blau, 1964) and based on the literature of SDT, the researcher believes
that employees will react according to the behavior of the despotic leader and reciprocate in a way
that will harm the work fellows, as it might be difficult for them to harm the leader directly.

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