“All Hands on Deck” or “Hands off the Tiller”? Linking Understaffing and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

In this paper, we seek to clarify competing perspectives on the relationship between workplace staffing conditions and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). On one hand, workers may engage in more OCBs in the face of understaffing, reflecting a greater inclination to help during their organizations’ time of need. On the other hand, workers may engage in fewer OCBs due to understaffing, reflecting a withdrawal of effort under stressful circumstances to protect and conserve resources. Integrating social exchange principles with research on human resource (HR) attributions, we examine these two possibilities and their underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions across three multi-wave survey studies. We find some support for both perspectives. That is, manpower understaffing can prompt OCBs via greater felt challenge, whereas expertise understaffing can subvert OCBs via lower felt obligation to the organization but can also promote OCBs via greater felt obligation to one’s coworkers. Additionally, expertise understaffing can either enhance or diminish feelings of challenge, leading to downstream effects on OCBs, depending upon circumstances. Finally, relations between understaffing and proposed mediators varied based on perceived chronicity of staffing conditions and attributions regarding the degree to which staffing conditions were due to factors external to the organization (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic), respectively. Implications of our results for theory and practice are discussed.