Exemplary followership. Part 2: impact of organizational citizenship behavior

The purpose of this study is to determine to what extent there is a predictive relationship between organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and followership behaviors within medical organizations in the USA. This is the second part of a two-part paper. It uses a revised followership instrument and an OCB instrument to determine if there is a predictive relationship between OCB and followership behaviors.

Part 1 of this quantitative survey-based empirical study used confirmatory factor analysis on an existing instrument and exploratory factor analysis on a revised instrument. Part 2 used regression analysis to explore the predictive relationship between followership and organizational citizenship.

The overall findings of this two-part paper show that organizational citizenship has a significant predictive impact on followership behaviors.

Participants in this study work exclusively in the health care industry; future research should expand to other industries and other large organizations that have many followers but few managerial leaders.

As organizational citizenship can be developed and there is a predictive relationship between organizational citizenship and followership, organizations can develop professional development for individual followers. Managers and other leaders can learn how to develop OCB, and thus followership in several ways: onboarding, coaching, mentoring and executive development.

Part 2 of this paper demonstrates the predictive impact that OCB can have in developing high performing followers.