Service Employees' Organizational Citizenship Behaviors and Customer-Oriented Behaviors: An Accountability Theory Perpective

Many studies have argued and successfully verified the positive effects of leader-member exchange on organizational citizenship behaviors, using justice theory. However, we argue that accountability theory provides a prospective view of an employee's organizational citizenship behaviors in a given leader-member exchange relationship, while justice theory provides a retrospective view. In addition, we contend that the employee's customer-oriented behaviors should be treated as a type of organizational citizenship behaviors directed to customers. Based on responses from 256 service employees in 54 full-service restaurants in a metropolitan city in Korea, we show the positive effects of two dimensions of leader-member exchange on two types of organizational citizenship behaviors and customer-oriented behaviors, using multivariate analysis of variance. The new approach to understanding the relationship between leader-member exchange and organizational citizenship behaviors provides valuable insights to academic researchers as well as industry practitioners.