Compulsory citizenship behavior and employee silence: The roles of emotional exhaustion and organizational identification

Abstract

Past research on citizenship behavior has pointed primarily to its voluntary side— organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)—but some scholars have suggested that there is a nonvoluntary version of citizenship behavior—compulsory citizenship behavior (CCB). Drawing on conservation of resources theory and social identity theory, in this research we firstly examined the psychological mechanism underlying the relationship between CCB and the critical workplace deviant behavior of employee silence by developing a moderated mediation model wherein CCB predicted subordinates’ silence behavior through emotional exhaustion, with organizational identification acting as the boundary condition. Results from 2-wave lagged data (N = 242) collected in the manufacturing sector in China support our hypothesized model. We found that CCB was positively related to employee silence, and emotional exhaustion fully mediated this relationship; organizational identification weakened the relationship between CCB and emotional exhaustion, and organizational identification weakened the indirect effect of CCB on employee silence via emotional exhaustion. Contributions, practical implications, and several promising avenues for future research are discussed.