Change-Oriented Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: The Direct and Moderating Influence of Goal Orientation

Lance A. Bettencourt

“We value our Associates for their many contributions to the company, including their great ideas. At least one Associate from each of our stores is invited to attend our annual meeting each year. We gather these Associates together and ask them for their suggestions and ideas on how we can make Kohl’s even better. Their creative and well thought-out suggestions have resulted in new systems and programs that streamline our in-store processes and improve internal communications to better serve our customers.” ~Kohl’s 2002 Annual Report

As Kohl’s has discovered, retail employees who are closest to store operations and customers often have great ideas for improving retail processes. Although formalized idea gathering approaches such as the one reported by Kohl’s are no doubt valuable, retail store employees are daily coming up with and implementing subtle but important changes to how work processes can be improved for greater retail efficiency and effectiveness. Despite their wealth of potential knowledge, however, retailers face a considerable challenge in stimulating these types of innovative contributions from store employees. At their very nature, such change-oriented behaviors are beyond the traditional scope of performance responsibilities. At the very least, they rely on considerable discretion from store employees because such behaviors can easily be withheld without any negative consequences.

So what motivates store employees to engage in such voluntary efforts to improve retail operations? And what can the retailer do to encourage these types of constructive extra-role behaviors from its employees and across its many remote retail stores? In this paper, results of an empirical study are presented that begin to answer these important questions. More specifically, surveys were gathered and analyzed from 183 full-time retail store employees and their managers from a national retail sales organization. The survey to store employees included measures of various leadership behaviors, individual goal orientation traits, and change-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Drawing from related literature on citizenship behaviors, change-oriented OCBs are defined as constructive, extra-role efforts by individual retail employees to identify and implement organizationally functional changes with respect to work methods, policies, and procedures within the context of their jobs, stores, or organizations. The study’s results offer guidance to retail executives who desire to stimulate and manage change in their organizations for competitive advantage.

First, the results reveal that a key driver of employee willingness to engage in change-oriented OCBs is individual learning goal orientation. That is, to what extent does an individual store employee desire to develop himself or herself by acquiring new skills, mastering new situations, and learning from new experiences. Although a learning goal orientation is a somewhat stable individual trait that varies across employees, some research also suggests that characteristics of the work climate can encourage its development. Thus, the research presented in this paper suggests that retailers can stimulate change by enhancing learning goal orientation among their associates either through incorporation of learning goal orientation measures in selection systems for new retail hires or by fostering a work climate that encourages the development of individual learning goal orientations among current associates (e.g., long-term focus in performance evaluations, emphasis on personal development, and procedures designed to encourage risk-taking).

Second, the results also reveal the importance of a high quality relationship between individual store employees and store management in stimulating change-oriented OCBs. In fact, the results indicate that it is the perception of a high quality relationship with store management and not commitment to the organization itself that drives these behaviors. Retailers can therefore stimulate constructive change by facilitating high quality relationships between store managers and associates. This may include emphasis on the softer skills of managing employees in selecting, promoting, training, and rewarding store managers. Such skills likely include treating employees with respect and fairness, showing consideration for individual needs, and providing a supportive work environment. In addition, store managers should be encouraged to work with employees individually to meet their information needs, to ensure that they have access to the resources needed to perform effectively, and to develop levels of autonomy that individual employees enjoy.

Finally, the results reveal that both contingent reward (e.g., positive recognition and feedback) and transformational leadership (e.g., seeking to elevate follower goals and values beyond current performance tasks) behaviors are important for stimulating change because they lead to the development of high quality relationships with store management. In particular, retailers should seek to develop transformational leadership behaviors through leadership training and 360° feedback systems. These behaviors were shown not only to have twice the influence on developing high quality store manager relationships in comparison to contingent reward leadership behaviors, but also to have direct influence on change-oriented OCBs among employees with high levels of performance goal orientation (i.e., employees who are driven to receive favorable performance evaluations from others). Because store managers at most retailers have little training in such transformational leadership behaviors as sharing the vision of the retailer and have few tools to facilitate such behaviors, emphasis on developing these behaviors offers great potential for developing an organizational climate for learning that is distinguished from the competition.