A paper by Magda Donia is honoured by a top journal in organizational behaviour

Professor Magda Donia has been honoured for her article in the Journal of Business and Psychology which makes an original contribution to the research on organizational-citizenship behaviours. She received an Editors Commendation from the JBP for her paper, one of only 8 papers selected for this distinction out of a total of nearly 500!

• Donia, M. B., Johns, G., & Raja, U. (2016). Good soldier or good actor? Supervisor accuracy in distinguishing between selfless and self-serving OCB motives. Journal of Business and Psychology, 31(1), 23-32.

Employees are said to engage in organizational citizenship behaviours, or OCBs, when they perform positive acts that go beyond the day-to-day tasks expected of them. Donia and her team were interested in the underlying individual motivation for engaging in these behaviours. They investigated the extent to which supervisors can effectively distinguish the “selfless actors” from those that engage in OCBs primarily to ingratiate themselves with their bosses. The results of the study, based on a sample of 197 supervisor-subordinate pairs, revealed that the supervisors were able to accurately identify their subordinates’ OCB motives. They were not fooled by “good actors.”

Reseachers will continue to be interested in the motivation people attribute to employees who engage in OCBs, given the role of supervisors in reward and promotion decisions and the notion that OCBs should be encouraged. For now, professor Donia has made an original contribution to the topic with her exploration of supervisors’ accuracy in identifying those motivations.