Are You a Good Colleague?
The unpaid, unrequired things that make a workplace work
Job descriptions cover what you are paid to do. Organisational citizenship behaviour covers everything colleagues do beyond that - the help nobody assigned, the effort that goes to the organisation rather than any one task, the willingness to speak up instead of just enduring. Research going back to the late 1980s treats this as a real, measurable part of how workplaces function, separate from performance reviews.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about your usual pattern at work over the past few months, not about an unusually busy or unusually quiet stretch.
What it measures
Three components drawn from organisational citizenship research: helping individual colleagues directly, supporting the organisation as a whole, and speaking up or staying informed beyond your own tasks. It is different from the team-role test on this site, which describes which job you naturally take in a group, not whether you go beyond it - this one is about discretionary effort, the part nobody can require of you.
Based on: Organisational citizenship behaviour (Organ; Lee & Allen)
Possible results
Helping colleagues
Whether you help coworkers directly, on your own initiative.
Supporting the organisation
Whether you go along with things that help the organisation as a whole, not just individual coworkers.
Speaking up and staying informed
Whether you raise ideas and problems rather than just quietly tolerating them.
Common questions
Is being a good colleague the same as being a pushover?
No, though the two can look alike from outside. The research distinguishes discretionary helping, which is chosen, from behaviour driven by an inability to say no or a fear of consequences - the difference is whether you could stop and would feel comfortable doing so.
Can these behaviours be faked for a performance review?
Briefly, but the research on organisational citizenship generally studies it as a pattern coworkers report over time, not a single visible act, so short-term impression management tends to be less durable than people expect.
Does being a good colleague get rewarded?
It is linked to how colleagues and supervisors rate someone informally, though the link to promotions and pay is inconsistent across studies - organisations vary a lot in whether they notice or reward it.
Sources
- Organ, D. W. (1988). Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome. Lexington Books.
- Lee, K., & Allen, N. J. (2002). Organizational citizenship behavior and workplace deviance: The role of affect and cognitions. Journal of Applied Psychology. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.87.1.131
- Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Paine, J. B., & Bachrach, D. G. (2000). Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Critical Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature and Suggestions for Future Research. Journal of Management. doi:10.1177/014920630002600307
An honest note This is Quinthea's own wording, adapted from research on organisational citizenship behaviour, so scores are not comparable to any published questionnaire's norms. This research was mostly done in North American and other Western workplaces, and how far it generalises to different work cultures and power structures is unclear. High scores here are not always healthy - the same behaviours can also come from a workplace that quietly expects unpaid extra effort, or from difficulty saying no.