Three essays on citizenship crafting

Abstract

This dissertation contains three essays that develop and test a new construct, citizenship crafting. Citizenship crafting describes employee-initiated behaviors and cognitions that seek to enhance/continue or diminish/eliminate employee citizenship behaviors so that they better align with the employee’s needs, motives, and preferences. Engaging in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) results in both personal costs and benefits for employees. The aim of these papers is to advance our understanding of how employees deal with the personal consequences of OCB and to demonstrate that those who craft their citizenship are able to reap more personal benefits from OCB and reduce the personal costs. These essays seek to advance both OCB and crafting research. In Essay 1, I develop the construct of citizenship crafting. First, I deductively define citizenship crafting and differentiate it from the related construct of job crafting. I then propose the different dimensions of job crafting and explain how they are all important ways that employees craft their OCB. Following my discussion of the dimensions of citizenship crafting, I propose how citizenship crafting moderates the relation between OCB and employee personal outcomes. Specifically, I describe how citizenship crafting enhances the positive personal outcomes of OCB and diminishes the negative personal outcomes of OCB. I also discuss how the type of OCB is relevant for understanding citizenship crafting. In particular, crafting resource-demanding OCBs benefits employees more than crafting non-resource-demanding OCBs. I conclude by discussing the implications my research has for theory and practice and outline some directions for future research. In Essay 2, I build on Essay 1 and empirically develop the citizenship crafting scale (CCS). Using three samples, I establish content adequacy, convergent validity, divergent validity, and a nomological network. Furthermore, in this paper, I empirically demonstrate the difference between job crafting and citizenship crafting. In Essay 3, I use the CCS developed in Essay 2 to test specific ideas proposed in Essay 1. Specifically, I examine how citizenship crafting moderates the relationship between OCB and employee well-being, using two indicators of employee well-being (citizenship fatigue and citizenship meaningfulness) Drawing on self-regulation theory, I show how citizenship crafting enhances the positive relationship between OCB and positive indicators of employee well-being and how it reduces the negative relation between OCB and negative indicators of employee well-being. I conclude by discussing the implications my research has for theory and practice.