Influence of Centrality in a Friendship Network on Organizational Citizenship Behaviour

Abstract

The relationship between the organizational citizenship behavior of academic staff and certain social network attribute variables, considered from the perspective of a social network needs to be better understood; however, the existing literature is scant and ambiguous. This study verifies the influence of an individual’s level of centrality in a friendship network centrality on the organizational citizenship behavior of academic staff, and it explores the mediating role of team cohesion as a potential mechanism in this relationship. This paper uses the structural equation model approach to analyze the sample data, which consists of 187 academic staff from twenty-three scientific research teams. The findings reveal that centrality in a friendship network has a significant effect on teachers’ organizational citizenship behavior. The results also demonstrate the mediating role of team cohesion in the relationship between friendship network centrality and organizational citizenship behavior. Specially, the results of the Smart Partial Least Squares (Smart PLS) indicate that this structural model has high predictive power. Theoretical and practical implications and limitations are discussed and suggestions regarding future work are given.