Personality-Task Interdependence Interaction in Predicting Salespeople’S Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) has become recognized as an important factor in effective sales performance. OCB is defined as worker behavior that is discretionary and that promotes the organization’s interests (e.g., voluntarily helping others, actively participating in meetings etc.). Personality traits such as conscientiousness can be important predictors of OCB, and there is some evidence that personality interacts with situational factors. For example, in comparing jobs with and without promotion opportunities, it has been shown that ambition positively predicts OCB in jobs where the OCB can lead to promotions, but conscientiousness predicts OCB in jobs without promotion opportunities. We reasoned that the same kind of finding would hold for a different situational variable, task interdependence. When interdependence is high, ambitious people will be motivated to engage in OCB because it will indirectly benefit them, while conscientious people will be more motivated in less interdependent situations.