Relationships Among Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Counterproductive Work Behavior, and Sexual Harassment Based on a Colleague’s Sex or Gender

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is often viewed as an unequivocal boon. However, differing motivations and external pressures can change OCB’s relationship with counterproductive work behavior (CWB) and sexual harassment. We take a novel approach to understanding the relationship between OCB, CWB and sexual harassment by exploring the role of engaging in interpersonally directed OCB and CWB because of targeted colleagues’ sex or gender. We use the terms “gendered OCB” and “gendered CWB” to refer to engaging in OCB or CWB because of the gender or sex of the target of the behavior (e.g. a colleague). We examined the relationships among OCB, CWB, and sexual harassment in a sample of 503 Prolific users (60.2% men) in the United States. Interpersonally directed OCB that was sex/gender agnostic had near-zero correlations with general CWB and sexual harassment. However, gendered OCB had significant and positive relationships with both general CWB (r =.15) and engaging in sexual harassment (r =.35). Gendered OCB’s positive association with both desirable and undesirable behaviors is reflected in models fitting best when gendered OCB loaded on both the sexual harassment and OCB latent factors. Such findings challenge views of citizenship behaviors as universally “good.”.