High-performance work systems and organizational citizenship behavior: the role of goal congruence and servant leadership

Purpose Aligning employees' goals with organizational goals is an overarching objective of an organization to increase employees' outcomes and, ultimately, the firm's performance. Employees' perceived goal congruence is proposed to be an important mediator of the effect of high-performance work systems (HPWS) on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB). In this paper, the authors proposed and tested a moderated mediation model that depicted how servant leadership increased or restrained these effects. Design/methodology/approach This study used data from 56 managers and 322 employees working in Bangladeshi organizations. The study conducted cross-level analyses using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to examine the hypothetical relationships among variables. Findings This study revealed that employees' perceived goal congruence mediated the influence of HPWS on OCB. Consistent with the moderated mediation prediction, employee-perceived goal congruence mediated the relationship between HPWS and OCB when servant leadership is high. Originality/value This study examined how and when HPWS affects OCB by incorporating perceived goal congruence and servant leadership as mediating and moderating variables, respectively.