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This study addressed the role of motives in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).
Three motives were identified through factor analyses: prosocial values, organizational concern, and impression man- agement.

Scales that measured these motives and other variables known to covary with OCB were administered to 141 municipal employees and were correlated with self-, peer, and supervisor ratings of 5 aspects of OCB.

Relative to the other motives, prosocial values motives were most strongly associated with OCB directed at individuals, and organizational concern motives were most strongly associated with OCB directed toward the organization.

Each of the motives accounted for unique amounts of variance in OCB. The results suggest that motives may play an important role in OCB.

In recent years, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has gained the attention of many industrial-organizational psychologists (Borman & Penner, 2001).

The current interest in OCB can be traced back at least to Katz (1964). Katz's thesis, subsequently made more explicit by Smith, Organ, and Near (1983), was that for organizations to operate successfully, their employees must be willing to do more than the minimal formal and specified technical aspects of their jobs.

The assumed importance of OCB to organi- zational success has led to numerous attempts to identify its proximal and distal causes. The present study represents one such effort.

Most conceptualizations of OCB suggest that it has two major dimensions: altruism—prosocial behaviors that are directed at specific individuals or groups within the organization—and conscientiousness (or generalized compliance)—prosocial behaviors directed at the organization.

In 1995, Organ and Ryan carried out a metaanalysis of the correlates of each OCB dimension. For both dimensions, the largest correlations were for attitudinal variables such as job satisfaction, (perceived) fairness, organizational commitment, and (perceived) leader consideration.
Overall, personality traits and measures of affect (e.g., negativity) correlated weakly with the two dimensions of OCB.

The only exception was the trait of conscientiousness (Costa & McCrae, 1992). These findings led Sheila M. Rioux, Department of Psychology, University of South Florida and Development Dimensions International, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Louis A. Penner, Department of Psychology, University of South Florida.

This article is based on Sheila M. Rioux's doctoral dissertation, which was submitted at the University of South Florida.

Portions of this research were presented at the 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 1999, San Diego, California.

We are grateful to Tammy Allen, Walter Borman, and Mark Snyder for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Louis A. Penner, Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, PCD 4138, Tampa, Florida 33620-8200. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected].

Organ and Ryan to conclude that if dispositional variables play a role in OCB, it is only to the extent that they affect thoughts and feelings about a job.

It is difficult to dispute Organ and Ryan's claim about the importance of attitudinal variables as causes of OCB. However, more recent reviews of the literature (e.g., Bor- man, Penner, Allen, & Motowidlo, 2001; Motowidlo, Borman, & Schmitt, 1997) suggest that Organ and Ryan's conclusion about dispositional variables and OCB may have been a bit premature.

To be more precise, these studies provide substantial evidence that individual differences in personality traits and affect account for significant amounts of variance in OCB.

The present study takes a somewhat different approach to the role of individual-differences variables in OCB. Specifically, we investigated whether personal motives are related to OCB.

Much of the current research on the causes of OCB either implicitly or explicitly assumes that engaging in such behavior is a reaction or a response to an individual's perceptions of his or her job and the organization for which he or she works.

However, Penner, Midili, and Kegelmeyer (1997) suggested that OCB may also be a proactive behavior; that is, people may consciously choose to engage in OCB because such behaviors meet certain needs or satisfy one or more motives.

Furthermore, to understand the causes of these actions, one must identify the motives that underlie them. Penner et al. (1997) were not the only researchers to consider the role of motives in OCB (see, e.g., Bolino, 1999; Folger, 1993).

However, unlike these other authors, Penner et al.'s (1997) interest in motives and OCB was explicitly based on a functional approach to human behavior. The functional approach to behavior focuses on the function or purpose served by a behavior (Snyder, 1993).

Identifying the purpose or purposes served by a particular behavior enables one to better understand it and why the person has performed it. This approach assumes that much of human behavior is motivated by a person's goals and needs.

However, it does not assume that if two people engage in the same behavior, they have the same motives; nor does it assume that most behaviors serve only one motive. The same behavior may have multiple motives.

We know of no studies that have taken a functional approach to OCB. However, in recent years, several researchers (e.g., Snyder and his associates; see Clary et al., 1998; Omoto & Snyder, 1995) have used a functional approach to study volunteerism—the donation of time and effort to some charitable or service organiza- tion.

They and others (Clary & Orenstein, 1991; Penner & Finkel- stein, 1998) have found significant and replicable associations among motives and the quantity and quality of volunteer activities. These findings provided the theoretical impetus for the research reported here. There clearly are differences between volunteerism and OCB, but they also have some important characteristics in common.

First, both are discretionary prosocial behaviors; people choose to volunteer and to engage in OCB.
Second, both occur within an organizational context, and the recipients of the benefits of both OCB and volunteerism are either specific individuals associated with an organization or an organization itself.
Third, unlike other kinds of prosocial actions (e.g., helping a family member), there is no strong sense of personal or social obligation to help.
Finally, both kinds of prosocial behaviors typically occur over an extended period of time; they are not transitory responses to specific situations.

These conceptual similarities and overlap between volunteerism and OCB led Penner et al. (1997) to propose that examining motives would further researchers' understanding of its causes.

The present study empirically tested this proposal. To be specific, we developed a measure of motives for OCB. Then, in a field study, we measured motives and other variables previously shown to predict OCB. We expected that motives would correlate with OCB and explain variance in it not explained by other predictor variables.

Study 1: Scale Development
The goal of this study was to develop a reliable measure of motives for engaging in OCB. On the basis of extensive literature reviews and professional consultations, an initial set of 110 items concerned with the motives that might underlie OCB was created.1 These items were used to create a scale that measured OCB motives, and then the factor structure and the psychometric prop- erties of the scale were examined.

) Items loading on the first factor involved a desire by the participants for the company to do well and a desire for the partici- pants to show pride in and commitment to the organization. Thus, this factor was labeled Organizational Concern (OC) motives.
The second factor was labeled Prosocial Values (PV) motives because the items with the highest loadings on this factor involved a need to be helpful and a desire to build positive relationships with others.
The final factor was labeled Impression Management (IM) motives because the items with the highest loadings on it were concerned with a desire to avoid looking bad to coworkers and supervisors and to obtain rewards.(

Study 2: Motives and OCB
This study addressed the major theoretical question in this research effort: Do motives play a unique and significant role in OCB? Municipal employees completed self-report measures of constructs that had been previously found to be correlated with OCB (see the Method section below) and the CMS measure.

Because ratings of OCB may differ as a function of the rater (Morrison, 1994), self-, peer, and supervisor ratings of OCB were obtained. We predicted that the zero-order correlations between the motives and the ratings of the dimensions of OCB would be significant.

More important, we predicted that the motives would differentially correlate with the dimensions of OCB. Specifically, we expected that (a) PV motives would correlate most strongly with the altruism dimension, or OCBs directed at individuals in the organization, and (b) OC motives would correlate most strongly with the conscientiousness dimension, or OCBs directed at the organization.

We made no hypotheses about the correlates of IM motives because there was no clear theoretical basis for predicting differential correlations between IM motives and specific OCB dimensions.
Finally, we predicted that motives would account for unique variance in OCB. That is, when motives are entered into a hierarchical multiple regression after other predictors of OCB, they will add significant accounts of explained variance in OCB ratings. The other predictors were selected on the basis of two criteria.

First, the variable was already known to correlate with one of the dimensions of OCB, which enabled us to pit motives against other variables that were "shooting" at the same "targets." Second, there was some presumed conceptual association between each variable and at least one of the motives, which enabled us to use variables other than OCB to examine the construct validity of the CMS.