When and why employee avoidance crafting promotes coworker organizational citizenship behavior?

Abstract

Compared with the considerable body of research on approach, the role of avoidance crafting (i.e., reducing the demanding or stressful aspects of one's job) in coworker outcomes remains underexplored. Our study fills this gap by exploring the relationship between employee avoidance crafting and partner organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Drawing on role theory, we propose employees' role conflict as a mediator, and their trust in their partner as a moderator. To test the proposed moderated mediation, we collected two-wave data from 115 employee-work partner dyads three months apart. The average age of the employees was 31.20 years, and 66% were male. The analysis of actor-partner interdependence model revealed that employee role conflict significantly mediated the relationship between employee avoidance crafting and partner OCB. Specifically, employee avoidance crafting had a positive indirect effect on partner OCB by decreasing role conflict. The negative relationship between employees' avoidance crafting and role conflict was moderated by their trust in their partner such that this relationship was more pronounced when trust was low. Furthermore, trust in their partner moderated the indirect effect of avoidance crafting on partner OCB through role conflict. These findings offer novel insights into when and why avoidance crafting is helpful for coworker OCB and have implications for promoting the prosocial outcomes of job designs.